Josh and Laura Beth Egenolf grew up watching tame rabbits in the back yards of their family’s farms. Josh, a doctoral student at the University of Georgia’s Odum School of Ecology, recalls the many hours spent caring for the fluffy creatures and preparing them for 4-H projects as a young teenager. It was a natural progression, then, for this couple whose meals consist almost wholly from vegetables and meat raised within Athens-Clarke County, to raise rabbits for food.

This past October, Josh purchased two New Zealand white does—rabbit genders follow the same nomenclature as deer—from a local rabbit grower. He built a cozy, wire pen up off the ground, and away from the fire ants, for the females. The two California bucks he bought live on the ground in a moveable pen that allows them to feast on fresh grass each day. The does live above ground on account of their sensitivity to stress. Here in Georgia, non-native fire ants represent the greatest threat to a tame rabbit’s otherwise peaceful life. Josh chose to mate the New Zealand whites and California breeds based on personal research that pointed to healthy, robust, plump offspring. Rabbits raised to be eaten are called fryers. (Their chicken counterparts are called broilers.) After the first mating in January, the two does birthed a litter totaling 11 kits, or baby bunnies, exactly 30 days later.

“You could set a clock to their gestation period,” Josh says of the precise time period that passes between the female rabbits’ fertilization and the birthing process. To his deep dismay, Josh was not present when his first batch of kits arrived in the world. The mothers gave birth on a freezing, rainy February night and nine babies died before morning. Raising livestock always comes with difficult lessons. Josh knows now to watch the mothers closely for clues. Just before giving birth, a doe will begin scratching fur off of her neck to arrange a downy-soft, well-insulated nest for her newborn. With the coldest temperatures behind them, Josh and Laura Beth now plan to monitor the rabbits’ survival in the sometimes extreme heat of a Georgia summer.

“Rabbits are sensitive to stress. But they have evolved to respond to stress better,” Josh explains. If mother rabbits sense extreme temperatures, external dangers, or malnutrition within themselves, they will re-absorb their yet unborn babies into their bodies. The uterus of a rabbit, then, can act as a second stomach when necessary.

When asked why they chose to raise rabbits over other livestock, such as chicken, Laura Beth and Josh point to the novelty of rabbit meat and its potential local market. Laura Beth, a teacher at Waseca Montessori School in Athens, explains that most patrons at the Farm 255 restaurant where she works part-time, want to be educated on different meat sources and are willing to try new things. The couple plan to offer the locally processed rabbit meat to either area restaurants or the public once their operation grows to a steady supply. Rabbits are low-maintenance livestock that require almost no additional food beyond grass and other green vegetation, dried or fresh. The hardest part of raising rabbits? Eating them, the couple says. Already Josh and Laura Beth have assigned names to the nearly month-old bunnies, as well as the does and bucks. But both know these rabbits have always existed for them to be consumed.

“It will be another hoop,” Laura Beth says when the time comes.