Moonshine Stud

Over the course of the last 150 years, many different breeds of domestic poultry have been reared.  The idea of keeping fowl as domestic animals and not just for profit came into vogue when cock-fighting was banned and the idea of a poultry show was introduced.  The earliest recorded show was at held in the grounds of London Zoo in 1845.  The birds were shown three to a cage and they were valued at as much as £5 each, an astonishingly high price at this time.

Pliny the Elder: [1st century CE] (Natural History, Book 8, 81): The fertility of rabbits is enormous. By eating all the crops, rabbits brought famine to the Balearic Islands, to such extent that the people there petitioned Augustus to send troops to fight the beasts. Rabbits are hunted with ferrets.
Isidore of Seville: [7th century CE] (Etymologies, Book 12, 1:24): Rabbits (cuniculi) are rural animals, named from caniculi (small dogs) because they are taken when tracked by dogs.

Rabbits During WW2 -  Food was scarce so people bred rabbits to supplement heavy rationing. Sometimes the best rabbits were kept for show!

"My father owned three cottages which were bombed and no longer inhabitable. He was a master butcher and decided to keep tame rabbits and chicken in the gardens of the three cottages. I was about ten or eleven at this time and American forces were using the derelict,bombed out area as a training ground for house to house street fighting. It was my responsibility to feed the rabbits which were in hutches and on this particular day I gathered dandelions as usual and went to feed them. Unfortunately I discovered to my horror that somehow the rabbits had escaped.
I could hear loud bangs and explosions nearby but took no notice. I was too upset over the loss of the rabbits and the trouble I'd be in at home. I burst into tears and sat on a half demolished wall. Suddenly from nowhere appeared an enormous American soldier he asked me why I was crying and when I told him he yelled 'Cease fire'.A number of men arrived and were told to look for'the little girl's rabbits' and they did so after giving me some chocolate to cheer me up. It was an hour later that the last one was retrieved. This took place some months before D.day"

"My name is Peter Cotton and as a child I lived in Chesterton on a council estate named Beasley. Like children of my age, that being eight years old, I wanted a pet rabbit. At this paticular time they were hard to get hold of,there appeared a shortage of them. I was told of a man named Sid in Beasley Avenue who kept rabbits, so one day I stopped him to ask if he would sell me one. "No" was the answer. He would give me one, but I must feed it and keep it in his garden, hutch provided. I agreed, a few of my friends did the same.
How did we feed them?Those who remember, may recall waste food bins (pig bins), these were placed around the estate so that the residents could put any waste food in them. This food was then collected and taken to the work house hospital on London Road, Newcastle.It was then boiled and fed to the pigs that the work house reared to help feed the needy, any spare they sold to other local 'pig keepers.'It had the name 'Tottnem Pudding', so it was a valuable animal food supply, it was an offence to take food out of these bins. We used the bins for our wicket at that time because there no cars on the estate, only horse carts, so it was safe to play.But back to my rabbit feeding, Sid told us the cabbage, carrots and other food that rabbits eat could be found in these bins, so each night our gang equipped with torch and bag raided the bins.Well, our rabbit grew big on this supply of food, but after a while Sid would tell us our rabbit had died. To cover our disappointment he would give us another young one in its place, this happened a lot of times. As I grew older I realised what Sid had been doing, so to give my mind a clear conscience from raiding the bins I thought well, I helped to feed part of the nation"

"My father kept rabbits, as did many like him. There were a number of air bases near us, and they used to take all their rubbish by lorry to a large pit at Kettleburgh. We noticed that they often had lots of packing cases and my Dad mentioned that he would like some for the rabbits. So my brother and I went and stood in the middle of the road to ask for some cases. They used to leave us some by the side of the road for about a month afterwards. In the end I suppose they got fed up with us!"

"Like many of the other local residents, we kept rabbits during the war. They were very cheap to keep. You could gather food for them from the hedgerows, like Sheep’s Parsley and any stale bread you’d put in the oven and give it to them. You never had to buy any rabbit food. It was our job as kids to look after the rabbits and dig the garden. We also kept ferrets at the bottom of the garden for rabbiting. Quite a lot of farm workers kept them as a way of earning extra cash"

WW2 People's War is an online archive of wartime memories contributed by members of the public and gathered by the BBC. The archive can be found at www.bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar