Ok, you asked for it.
When I grew up every second house had rabbits and/or chicken, at my grandparents that was what made quite a percentage of the meat.
About 7 years ago there was a huge wild population of wild rabbits around the house I lived in, attemts to grow a vegetable garden were thwarted, so, remembering that rabbits are quite tasty, I harvested (poached would be the more correct term) some. That wasn't easy, so raising rabbits for meat seemed to be a good idea since I needed something to care for anyway.
Didn't work out as planned, first thing I realised was that that traditional hutches were just cruel. Then, in my first year with bunnys there was a Myxo outbreak in the wild population, taking out 14 of my 15 rabbits. When I realised what I was dealing with I tried to quarentine the still uneffected rabbits by putting one rabbit in each room, well, sole surviver was my black fury, Ute. Had her in a cage at first, couldn't watch it and let her free roam. In 8 months indoors she almost succeded twice in killing me, and pretty much wrecked my apartment, but what a character...
Got a second "doe" in spring, was happy how well they got along - Ute had her first litter in my kitchen. Another lesson learned.
2 does from that litter got away, became pets of the neighbouring building demolishing company, started a new wild population. Never bothered much with fences, they don't run away anyway.
Another thing is, they are social animals. They have a very sophisticated way to deal with each other, and being prey animals, imho they crave for company. Well, most do, I had some that were happier alone, sold those off.
That's why I keep them in pairs, jthe does in mother/daughter pairs since this gives me the opportunity to select a doeling that gets along with the old one best. I did some mistakes there, since this were quite submissive does, good for the peace, but they are not fond of being touched, to put it mildly. Makes handling difficult.
Situation now is that my herd buck is my free range house bunny, there is no cage or so, and he got one of hs daughters, Dotty, spayed as cuddlebun.
Ute, my black fury, lives with one of her daughters, "the Red", and is still my best breeding doe. I was calling the secoond doe Shrew for obvious reasons, but, well, I didn't come around giving her a real name yet.
The other pair was Magda the Grey ( If I had read (no TV) GoT earlier I might have named her after that younger Stark girl), and her daughter Chantal. Magda died about a month ago, missing becoming grandmother by a week, Chantal had a litter of 5 and they are doing great, I'm somewhat at a loss about the genetics going on, but I hope that agouti kit is a girl, would keep as company for her mother.
Still, any surplus rabbits are meat. Due to new "animal protection laws" which limited the ways one can advertise his animals (as long as you aren't a commercial enterprise, pet shop or so) I can't sell many off, many breeds of lifestock will go extinct in short time, an unfathomable loss for humanity. It's utter hybris to think we are any better than 80 years ago, and that we don't need any way to enable the population to feed itself - there'll be always enough oil to import proteins from places where we don't care how they are produced....
Just to higlight another aspect, I live alone, incompatible to that stuff humans normally do, don't have the time for a dog, so it's rabbits that keep me company. More than that, they rely on me, they keep me going, couldn't let them down.
