We all start somewhere. None of us are born knowing how to harvest, process, or butcher meat rabbits. Fortunately, today, we have excellent resources to learn from right at our fingertips.
If you have access to the internet—which you obviously do if you’re here—you have access to all the learning resources you need.
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Top Three Meat Rabbit Harvesting and Butchering Resources
People often ask for harvesting and butchering videos. It’s an important thing to know! And you’re smart to search this information out well ahead of time before you need it so you can learn and prepare yourself and know what you’re in for.
And so I’ve put together this list, which is our top three learning resources for slaughtering meat rabbits. Finding these is what made butchering make sense.
The presenters in these videos anticipated and answered the remaining questions we had, including those little things you run into when processing that you aren’t quite sure what to do about.
What I like best about these courses and videos is that these are real people in a real backyard. They don’t use any fancy equipment that any backyard rabbit raiser isn’t likely to have. (No crazy processing equipment is one of the best reasons to raise meat rabbits!)
These resources are sure to help you, too.
Brick House Acres BHA Rabbitry Meat Rabbit Processing Course
This is a complete course on processing meat rabbits from start to finish. It comes from Alyssa at BHA Rabbitry in New York. Alyssa is a homesteader, homeschooler, wife, and mother. She’s an excellent teacher who has clearly put a lot of thought and loads of information into her online meat rabbit butchering course.
Alyssa gives you more than just a how-to video. There are downloads, printouts, and resources you can take with you to the processing station.
She starts with humane dispatch and offers up some options, which is a part of the process that a lot of videos and resources skip (many will start with the dispatched rabbit and just show you how to skin and eviscerate or gut it).
She also goes into some important topics, like how to handle attitudes about keeping and processing meat rabbits and personal experiences, including getting over your own anxiety and fears.
Alyssa talks about gaining reverence and respect for your food and how that comes from the experience of raising your own meat and meat rabbits. This helps a lot to bridge that gap of “How could you? How could I?”
She's a real support who shows us we can all do this! That’s value in and of itself!
You can find Alyssa’s Meat Rabbit Processing Course Here.
There is a modest charge for the course, but it’s lifetime access and well worth the price at under $40 USD. It’s something you can (and will) come back to again and again as you get your processing legs under you.
The course is completely online, and it only takes about one hour from start to finish (but you can come back to it and pick up where you left off at any time).
She does also cover packaging whole rabbits, cutting the rabbit meat up, and parting out the rabbit.
The Valley Farmstead on YouTube
The Valley Farmstead on YouTube presents this video from a commercial meat rabbit producer and butcher. He raises, processes, and sells rabbit meat to restaurants in Oregon and California. He clearly knows what he’s doing.
Though he is fast at what he does, he also presents the process in real, but slowed-down, time so you can follow along.
His process is very similar to Alyssa’s. His videos did answer a question or two that enhanced what we learned from the BHA Rabbitry course. He may have done one or two things differently, and we picked up on those as a little easier way for us.
What’s nice about his video is that it’s concise enough to bring the phone or tablet out and have it ready to refer to or follow along with. That worked well for us while we were learning.
Since you will likely have a gap of many weeks or months between processing sets of meat rabbits, it’s nice to have a good, quick go-to as a reference or refresher. This video is it for us.
Interesting side note! This is the guy whose knives we admired so much, but at the time, we couldn’t find links or information for them. I’ve found them posted now, and I’m very glad to report that the knives he is using in this video are the exact same knives that I recommended in our Meat Rabbit Butchering Knife Guide (Victorinox Curved Shaping Knife and Victorinox Semi-stiff Boning Knife)
Find the Valley Farmstead meat rabbit butchering video here.
Adam Berkelmans Deboning a Rabbit Video
This video isn’t for dispatching and processing. Rather, this is for after-the-fact. It’s a neat way to debone a rabbit all in one piece.
With the rabbit completely deboned in one large strip, you can roll it, stuff it, cut it into chunks or strips, cut it down for grinding, and much more.
While this might sound like overkill for trim and parts when you get good at deboning a rabbit this way, you’ll find that it is just as fast, but with meat that comes out nicely cut and with versatile uses.
I do think that this process also leaves less waste on the carcass—more and better use of your rabbit meat!
When you get good at it (with practice, of course), I do suspect it’s one of the best ways to handle the deboning, no matter what you plan to do with the boneless rabbit meat after that.
Adam has done a nice job of presenting a concise video that is easy to follow, rewind, and follow again. It’s another good video to have at the ready while you’re teaching yourself to debone your rabbit meat.
Find Adam Berkelmans video on How to Debone a Rabbit in One Piece here.
Future Productions and Recommended Resources
We plan to add our processing videos and articles to this list in the future, but until that time—or along with it—we can readily and highly recommend these videos.
I do find value in learning from a variety of resources. We have, in fact, picked and chosen a few different things from these videos to land on the system that works the best for us.
We’ve watched other videos, but these are the processes that made the most sense and the videos and resources that helped us the most as we learned how to butcher and harvest our own meat rabbits at home. That’s why they're the three that make our list of recommendations, and I can recommend them without question or hesitation.
Casey David Kole
Thank you for your personal, and professional advice !!!
Mary Ward
You're welcome! Thanks for visiting the site!