Didn't see this thread earlier, so started making a new thread. Copying and pasting what I wrote for OP, giving my experience raising rabbits:
I have about three years' experience of raising, breeding, butchering, and eating meat rabbits. My wife and I ended up having to give it up, not because we were failing, but because processing their hides was getting to be too time consuming. We didn't want their furs to go to waste, but processing furs and hides was, as far as we were able to tell, an obnoxious, laborious, and time consuming process. Otherwise, although small livestock raising had more than its fair share of headaches, it was an extremely rewarding activity. So much so that we're now several months into our switch over to chickens. We tried quails at one point, but the quails were such brutal little psychopaths that we gave up pretty soon after the first time one of our roosters got fucking scalped by the other birds.
During our three years of rabbit raising, we ran into almost every problem with the rabbits you could imagine, and quite a few you couldn't. As far as I could tell from talking with other breeders, we were actually unusually successful at keeping our animals healthy - although it helped that we were raising them in such small numbers that we could devote more time to each animal than most. I'll be happy to answer any questions people have about rabbit raising, and would appreciate any advice people have about raising chickens on a small lot.
Basic Advice About Rabbits
I'm not going to go into a step-by-step discussion of rabbit husbandry here, but there's two big challenges about rabbits that people should know before getting into raising them. The first is that the rabbit digestive tract is extremely sensitive. We've all seen Bugs Bunny and know that rabbits love carrots, right? WRONG. The domestic rabbits' intestinal tract is a finely tuned machine. It has to be - their diet is principally grass, which is extremely hard to digest. Big animals, like cows, can handle it by having a vast, sprawling series of stomachs and tubes to really work the stuff over*. But rabbits are small critters, and can't do this, so their intestines are as finicky as a racecar's engine. So if you give them too much sugar - and a carrot counts as too much sugar from the perspective of a rabbit's intestines - or not enough roughage, or even just change the variety of feed** they're getting too suddenly, well. Their digestion will stop, they'll develop painful gas pockets in their intestines, and they will die a slow and agonizing death over several days' time. Once you know what to do, avoiding this isn't too hard, just a matter of routine care, but if you're underprepared for just how easily this can go wrong, you can lose some animals in a frankly pretty tragic way.
The second big issue is related. Rabbits poop. A lot. Again, digesting grass is difficult, and doubly so if you're a small animal, so there's a lot of undigested matter that comes out the other end. A *lot*. Frankly, dealing with rabbit waste was, for me, the most persistently unpleasant part of raising the wee beasties. Fortunately, because it has so much undigested fiber, etc., there's one place that you can always put your rabbit pellets: the garden. The feces of most animals is so high in nitrogenous waste that if you apply it directly to your plants, the high nitrogen content can cause "fertilizer burn," scorching plant leaves and ruining your garden. This is one of the reasons why you compost it. But rabbit waste is so high in undigested carbon that it can be applied directly to the soil in huge quantities (and by God, you'll get huge quantities) with no fear. Relatedly, it's so high in carbon that it's pretty sterile stuff - obviously, you'll want to wash your hands and produce before eating, but that's it. A good scrub is all you need. But still, you will need some sort of plan for collecting, moving, and using or disposing of your rabbits' waste products, and frankly I was never 100% pleased with any of our methods for doing it.
If you ask me "how could you be so cruel as to kill and butcher such an adorable animal!?!?" my answer is that a rabbit is one of the easiest animals to kill in a quick and humane manner. I never felt guilty about killing them - as long as we gave them a good enough life. We tried to give them as much time to bounce around and play as possible, but frankly I always felt worse about them not getting enough time to run around than I did about killing and eating them. The goal (not always realized, alas) was to make it so they only ever had one bad day in their lives - the last one. So take good care of your animals, keep them safe and healthy, and then enjoy their healthy, delicious meat products. For my part, I was especially fond of rabbit liver pan fried in a little butter, and then put on toast with some mustard and lemon pepper. An absolute delicacy.
*for any veterinarians and biologists here, i know that i am not being remotely precise, and i apologize, i'm trying to be at least slightly brief here
**and seed