On Sunday, one of my coworkers texted to ask if we still wanted ducks. He had been hunting and a few months ago I’d told him that I would take his birds because he never ate them and I thought it was a waste. He brought us six ducks, and thus started our first experience in duck plucking. We did a dry-pluck method based on this video:
Hank makes it look so easy! In reality, it took us probably 2.5 hours for all six ducks, including the cleaning process. We have no garage, so we did it in our kitchen after Ezra was down for the night. The ducks had a surprisingly earthy scent to them. I was not a fan. They had been shot with a shotgun so most of them had several holes. Two birds we finally decided we too holy so we threw them out, and one of them had rice breast disease which while not infecting to humans still grossed me out and we wouldn’t have eaten it. And then there were three.
I hadn’t really watched any cleaning videos so just winged it. I split open two of the birds and left the last one whole. The birds were pretty small when all was said and done and if we do it again, we will definitely do the wax method of removing feathers.
I cooked the three birds today and within the second bite I had to spit it out because I had chomped down on a buckshot piece. Not awesome. We threw all the birds out because we didn’t want to have to worry about eating lead. (And also I had massively overcooked them.) I told my coworker thanks but no thanks on future ducks he’s hunting. However, I did like the flavor of the duck; it was kind of rich. Maybe in the future we will have ducks when we have more space, but we’ll just wring their necks or something and not have to worry about what other things we could break our teeth on.
Today we bred the mellow white doe and the blue rex doe again. We bred the blue to the cali buck and the white doe to the chocolate rex again. I had planned on breeding both with the cali but changed my mind. Now I’m wishing I had in fact bred them both to the cali because if he can stud them both then we wouldn’t need the rex male and I could maybe sell him back to the original owner. We need the cage space and if the cali can get the job done so much the better. He has a better personality than the rex; he always comes to the front of the cage when I open it, wanting to be scratched, whereas the rex runs to the back of the cage and apparently hates to be touched.
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That being said, we do need another cage, and soon, because the kits are getting bigger and bigger, and I wanted to give mama a chance to have some time to herself, especially if the breeding from this afternoon took. I looked at the crazy white doe and told her her time was up. Jesse had a short day of classes today, so when he came home, we processed our first rabbit.
She ended up weighing six lbs. all dressed out. As you can see from the fat photo, even if she had been willing to breed she may not have been able to get pregnant because the fat can basically strangle the ovaries and tubes. On a healthy rabbit you should see very little fat on it (which is why you can literally starve if all you are eating is rabbit). Obviously I was over-feeding her. Fingers crossed this is not happening to the other does.
As of now we are “resting” the meat in the fridge for a couple days. Apparently the aging process makes for a more tender and flavorful rabbit, although because she was almost a year she will be tough so we will be crock potting her anyway.
The whole experience was a good one, I think. I also think doing the ducks earlier in the week kind of gave us a good starting place even though they were such vastly different animals. Neither one of us freaked out and though it took probably a half hour to an hour, we will get faster with practice. I don’t think the rabbit suffered in the killing, I feel it was done humanely all things considered. I feared it would be a scary and messy procedure this first time out, but I’m glad to say that I can see us doing this as a matter of course, and I’m happy to know where our food is coming from and how it was treated. We are meat eaters and I think having this connection to our food is a responsible decision.
Now I need to move the kits to their new cage and hunt down a good rabbit recipe!
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