The Bunny Butcher

A few years ago my husband got on a paella kick. In my Time-Life book The Cooking of Spain and Portugal, he read up on traditional paella, which is cooked over a fire. He start grilling it in an open Weber, and the result was an excellent dish enhanced by mesquite smoke and the cachet of outdoor cooking.

But grilling wasn’t enough. Mark decided if he was to make truly traditional paella, it would need to include rabbit. It was late summer and the San Mateo County Fair, whose grounds lie less than a mile from our house, was in full swing. As we wandered through the animal cages, we spotted some bunnies — “meat rabbits” their cages said. Raised by kids in the 4-H club, the rabbits were to be auctioned off at the end of the fair.

Aha! We would bid on some rabbits, have our traditional paella, and help out the 4-H Club all at once. We peered at the bunnies and picked out the tastiest-looking. Perhaps it should have surprised me that I could both appreciate their cuteness and imagine how good they’d be in a paella pan, but it didn’t.

I set out on the Saturday morning scheduled for the auction and signed in for a card with a number. After dozens of pigs (the auction was running late), it was time for rabbits. A pre-teen girl in the white pants and shirt and green necktie uniform of 4-H herded her three white bunnies on a bale of hay while the bidding started. The price quickly rose to $375 for the trio. Then a curly-haired boy of about 8 sold one rabbit for $300. These prices were more than I could afford, but the bunnies were grand champions, so I thought maybe I’d get a better deal with some of the lesser rabbits.

I looked around at the audience. The bunny bidders looked like grandparents, mostly, as well as local business owners looking for write-offs and some press. I started to doubt that any of these rabbits ever came close to a knife. I flipped through the auction program and read that while pigs, cows, chickens, and turkeys are sent to a butcher, the rabbits are “processed” by the kid who raised them. So if I bid on a rabbit for paella, that cute curly-haired boy would have to kill and skin his own bunny? This was starting to seem like a really bad idea.

The prices did drop, though the cheapest rabbit still went for $100. I was willing to pay a good price for the meat to help support 4-H, but there was no way I was going to ask a kid to kill a bunny he’d raised. Needless to say, I left the auction rabbit-less. Later we learned that meat rabbits are usually donated back to the youth exhibitor — that is, pardoned and kept as pets.

Non-kid-raised supermarket rabbits cost about $12 a pound, or $30 a carcass, which now strikes me as a great bargain.