Where does rabbit meat come from?
When rabbit meat is sold in retailers such as restaurants, many people assume that the meat comes from wild rabbits. However, most of the rabbit meat that is sold in the UK and elsewhere comes from farmed rabbits that have been reared specifically for meat production.

How many rabbits are farmed?
We believe that the industry is fairly small-scale in the UK. In the past, sources have indicated that around 250,000 to one million rabbits are reared for meat every year in the UK, but it is very difficult to get any accurate, up to date figures. Much greater numbers are reared in other European countries, such as France, where around 50 million rabbits are reared every year. Over 375 million are slaughtered each year in the EU as a whole.

What are rabbit farms like?
Any rabbit farms in the UK will typically be very small-scale, with roughly 10 to 200 breeding does (female rabbits) on an average-sized farm. Rabbit farming is sometimes advertised as a short-term way of making money using spare buildings, equipment and labour. There is currently no commercial body to represent rabbit farming in the UK, as there is for most of the other major types of farmed animals.

Farmed rabbits are often housed in buildings containing rows of bare wire cages, which may be arranged in a single row or stacked in two or more tiers. Eight or more growing rabbits are often kept together in a cage of around 0.56 square metres in floor area. This works out to be just over an A4-sized area of floor space for each rabbit in the cage. Cages are often only around 45 centimetres in height. Breeding does (females) without young and breeding bucks (males) are usually kept on their own in separate cages.

Each doe will have around five to eight litters of eight to ten young per year. The young rabbits (called kits or pups) are weaned at four weeks of age and slaughtered for meat at around 8 to 12 weeks, when they’ve reached around 2 kilogrammes in weight. The males and females that are kept for breeding are usually kept until around 18 to 36 months of age.

Further details about rabbit farming in Europe is available in the Scientific Panel on Animal Health and Welfare (AHAW) report on farmed rabbit housing and husbandry. Some photographs of typical European cage systems for rearing farmed rabbits are also available.

Are all farmed rabbits kept in cages?
A small number of UK farms may be rearing rabbits in improved conditions in open floor pens rather than cages, and may provide them with hay in addition to their diet of pellets.

A higher welfare system for rearing farmed rabbits has also been developed in Switzerland, which is designed to better meet the rabbit's behavioural and physical needs. In this system, which we believe is in use on a very small number of European farms, rabbits are kept together as family groups in larger enclosures, and are provided with access to different areas for feeding, exercise, resting, hiding and nesting.