Planning to put rabbit back on Britain’s menu

T & S Nurseries, based at Grantham, Lincs, has applied for planning permission to keep up to 1,100 rabbits at a time on a site at Fiskerton, near Newark, which is currently a tree nursery.

About 250 does would produce about 10,000 rabbits a year for meat, in a complex including outdoor runs – “about as free-range as is practically possible,” according to company spokesman Philip Kerry.

His company wants to use its understanding of hydroponics – growing without soil – to produce barley grass cheaply and use that to fatten rabbits to about five-and-a-half pounds in weight (2.5 kilos) at 12 weeks old. At current prices, the meat would fetch about £1.80 a kilo from a wholesaler.

Mr Kerry said this week: “A lady friend of mine told me recently she had paid £13 for a rabbit, in London, and thought it was a fair price.

“Celebrity chefs have been promoting it as a healthy option and I read somewhere that Waitrose said demand was up 350 per cent in a year. Certainly, we consume something like 3,000 tonnes every year, which is not an insignificant amount, but nearly all of it comes from Eastern Europe.

“Rabbit farming used to be quite big here 15-20 years ago but we just couldn’t compete with the Eastern European prices. However, hydroponic growing could make the difference.”

The meat rabbits would probably be New Zealand Whites or Californians. Some Angoras would be kept alongside them, to comb for their fur.

Objectors to the plan have focused on concerns about traffic and dirty bedding.

Mr Kerry said there would not be a lot of either and the bedding would be quickly composted and used in pots for the trees still being grown on the site.

Newark & Sherwood District Council is due to consider the application on May 18.

Waitrose said in January: “The unprecedented demand for this traditional British fare hops on the heels of celebrity chefs, including Nigel Slater, who have shown us how to make the most of rabbit.

“Rabbit is a versatile, low-fat meat with a subtle gamey flavour and can easily take the place of white meat in various recipes.”

According to the self-sufficiency website extopian.com: “Rabbits are not native to Britain. They may have come over with the Normans, who kept them in enclosures on their manors. There, they were looked after by a man called a warrener, who kept away predators.

“When rabbit meat was needed for the table, the warrener went in with his ferrets and caught a few.

“This system, first practised by the Romans, became part of the feudal estate, like the fish ponds which were kept stocked with various kinds of fish and the columbarium where the pigeons were kept.

“Rabbits escaped and became part of the countryside but until 1880, it was illegal for anyone except the owner of land, or his friends, to take rabbits.”

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