Rabbit Farming: Industrial, Small-Scale, and Organic Housing Systems

Rabbit housing systems should be designed according to production purposes. These systems are crucial to rearing rabbits, considering ease of management, compliance with national legislation rules and animal welfare, and implementation of external and internal biosecurity measures, among other premises. The rabbit species is highly versatile to rear and can be well accommodated from basic (e.g., subsistence agriculture, familiar) to modern climatic-conditioned sheds. Currently, the design of large-scale rabbitries for meat purposes, as well as fixed and variable costs, are well defined at the entrepreneur level. For small-scale rabbit production, aspects related to the rearing objectives of the producer, expected gains, initial investment capital, types of products to be obtained, and possibilities to adapt farm facilities without high initial investment assume relevance. In both realities, edaphoclimatic characteristics of the local area, route accessibility, compliance with animal welfare requirements, and public health, including antimicrobial resistance issues, need to be taken into account for rabbitry implementation. This chapter aims to approach different housing systems for rearing rabbits at large- and small-scale levels throughout worldwide regions.