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The original was posted on /r/homestead by /u/Velveteen_Coffee on 2023-11-05 19:27:21.

There is a significant portion of the homesteading community that need to stop giving advice when they have little to zero experience in what advice they are trying to give. From people suggesting that people get LSG dogs for their twelve backyard chickens to raising rabbits in colony’s I’m getting rather tied of advice that goes against decades of known animal husbandry with zero personal or scientific sources. I’m not just talking about on reddit; but rather, all social media. Blogs, YouTube, Reddit, Insta, etc…

Great Pyrenees depending on what sources go back as far as 3000B.C. but let’s be very conservative with our numbers and say they started at year 0A.D. and assume each dog was bred at an age of five. That’ll be a hair over 400 generations selected for livestock guarding. Now we have people in the homesteading community trying to use them to guard poultry claiming that when the dog inevitably kills some birds they were supposed to be guarding that you ‘have to find lines bred for poultry’. Even if someone was breeding for this for twenty years that would be about 3 maybe 4 generations. It’ll be a crapshoot if that dog can deal with poultry or not. It’s great if you have a dog like that; however, giving advice like that is why so many Great Pyrenees end abandoned or rehomed.

There has been one study I’m aware of that scientifically looked at raising rabbits in a colony as a viable means to meat rabbits. And when it comes up a lot of homesteaders like to point out her study without actually reading it. It was done by Julie Engel and here are the results. Some key take away’s are she had a near 75% kit mortality rate. She also claims that cage systems have a 25% mortality rate. I’m not sure where she gets this number from because the highest I can find is commercial rabbitry’s having about 20% kit mortality. If you are a homesteader who has meat rabbits or know someone who’s a member of a ARBA they don’t have near that 20% because you can give them more individual care.

A thing I would like to add is that I’m in no way trying to be insulting to Julie Engel, she did much needed scientific data collection. Just because something didn’t turn out how we expected or hoped doesn’t mean it wasn’t worthwhile because we learned something from it. With one final note; it doesn’t help that everyone uses the work ‘colony’ very liberally. For example, in a scientific laboratory with rabbits in cages that will many times be referred to as a breeding colony, just like pet owners refer to their same sex, matured, non-reproducing, and possibly desexed pets housed in a group as a colony, and how homesteaders will normally refer a bunch of does with a buck running amongst them reproducing at will as a colony.

What I’m getting at is please stop giving advice if you can’t do either one of two things; say you’ve done it multiple times yourself with recorded numbers/data, or cite a scientific source which back up what advice you are giving.

/endRANT