Oh my God!!! I am going to tell this story because it is part of the history of the Hunsinger Family but please read it quickly and move on. When we moved from San Jose to Grass Valley our lives definitely changed. I haven’t really analyzed all of the ways that our life changed but I want to deal with the subject of this article. We had a house built on the lake at Lake of the Pines. The contractor was Dick Janus (may he rest in peace) he was one of the smartest guys I ever knew. As it turned out he was actually one of our neighbors. The house that he built for us was beautiful and it had a 2-car detached garage. Everything about this house and property was awesome. I have racked my brain and have tried to figure out where the idea of raising rabbits came from. No one in my family ever raised any livestock of any kind. We lived in regular homes in cities. Not farms, not in the country. So, the idea of raising rabbits is extremely bizarre and curious. Maybe I was having a mid-life crisis. At the time we had just moved into this great house. We had 4 amazing children. Kathy and I were excited about what the future held for us. Somewhere in there I thought it was a good idea to raise rabbits. These we would raise to show. I guess if you took a long-term view of this whole thing maybe we would raise champion rabbits and sell them to people. In a perfect world we would have the greatest rabbits and we would provide great rabbits to others who had the idea of raising rabbits. Whatever. I still cannot believe that I did this and dragged my whole family into this thing with me. We literally all went down a “rabbit hole” together. I don’t know how I found out about all of this but I was able to order cages and have them shipped to our house. We ended up setting up the garage as our “rabbitry”. We called our business … The Rabbitry… and had cards made up. Incredible!! The cages had to be put together. Each stack was three cages high and we had 20 stacks so a total of 60 cages. It literally filled the entire garage. Then we bought rabbits from some breeder and we were off and running. We decided to raise a breed called “tans”. They are beautiful smallish rabbits. We thought they were an excellent choice. So, we started breeding our own rabbits and, in the beginning, it seemed like these particular rabbits thought sex was dirty so it became a big challenge just to get them to procreate. We eventually had success and filled all 60 cages. In the beginning I thought it was kind of therapeutic to feed and water all of the rabbits. Rabbits are quiet and they are in cages so they really didn’t cause any problems per se. Having said that I did have a job and needed to enlist the kids to help with feeding and watering the rabbits. Then there was the weekly trip to some fairground somewhere to show our rabbits. This was not high on the kids list of ways to spend Saturdays. We would get up at the crack of dawn each Saturday put the kids in the car along with the rabbits we planned to show and were off to some god forsaken fair ground to a Rabbit Show. What a dismal way to spend our Saturdays. Oh well…it seemed like the thing to do. We did have some modest success and actually some of our rabbits eventually became Grand Champions. Duh!! I guess there had to be something that kept us coming back. Kathy learned all the techniques of showing rabbits and got very good at it. How could I do this to her and the kids. This entire idea literally came out of nowhere. After we had been doing this for a while, we decided that if we were going to be serious rabbit breeders that we needed to go to seminars and learn more about doing this. We drove to Fresno State University and participated in a “Rabbit Seminar”. While at this seminar the guy presenting mentioned a problem that rabbit breeders were having. It was called “snuffles”. Basically, if one of your rabbits started showing symptoms which were not much more than sneezing or coughing you had to “cull the herd” so to speak. Meaning that if one of the rabbits got snuffles you potentially could lose all of your rabbits in a matter of days. This was actually happening throughout the rabbit raising world. Kathy and I couldn’t believe that our “herd” was so vulnerable. It was probably a good thing we went to that seminar because our rabbits were infected with snuffles soon after and we lost all of our rabbits. Again, this was probably a good thing because this little reality check made me rethink the whole rabbit thing. We dismantled the cages…sold them and were out of the breeding business almost as fast as we had gotten in. The entire nightmare only lasted about 18 months from start to finish. I still feel like I owe a grand apology to all of my children for dragging them into this. Jeff was probably too young to remember much of it but I messed with Bobby, Marti and Nanci at a time when doing anything else on Saturdays would have been better for them. Kids I am so sorry for “The Rabbitry” experiment.
One of the worst things was that we also were convinced that rabbit meat was not only heathy but also very tasty. I couldn’t do it but I enlisted my oldest Bobby to actually kill rabbits, skin them so we could eat them. I had a recent discussion with my daughter Marty and she said that there was no way she was going to eat rabbit meat from our rabbit herd. I can vouch for how tasty the rabbit meat was but I don’t think that Marti was capable of consuming any of our rabbits. Even though as breeders you never actually named any of the rabbits or got personally involved with any of them because the “culling of the herd” was always there looming over any of your rabbits at any time for anything. Again, how could I do this to my son and daughter. Nanci on the other hand thought all of this was great. She approached everything in a positive way and enjoyed our trips to fair grounds and attending the shows and actually had fun doing it. She somehow found ways to enjoy almost anything. I now understand how crazy it was that I expected my son to kill and skin our rabbits…unbelievable and unacceptable. I haven’t spoken to him about the experience in recent years. Maybe I don’t want to know the truth. At least the entire venture was short lived and now it is just a memory.
I have to believe that this whole idea must have somehow been part of a mid-life crisis for me. It is the only explanation that could possibly make sense.
Think about all of this for a minute. We were living a great life in San Jose…in a great house with a pool…we sold that house and moved into a great house in Grass Valley at Lake of the Pines on the Lake and the next thing you know we are setting up a Rabbitry in our garage. Maybe if the garage hadn’t been detached, we would have decided not to do it… I don’t know. I wish we had had an attached garage it would have probably caused us to never move forward with raising rabbits. It makes for an interesting story although kind of pathetic really. I had no business raising rabbits, I had no business dragging my family into it and thank God I had the good sense to end it. If you ever have a thought that might lead you down a similar path, please reconsider… think of me and my family and what those 18 months must have been like. The good news is that the mind usually has a difficult time remembering the pain of such things… and that is good.
