I got a rabbits foot charm online that I can tell is real, and I noticed it has an acrid odor like I have smelled inside a large mausoleum I was in, and imagine to be formaldehyde. How are rabbits feet made/cured? Are they tanned like leather do the feet contain meat that would rot without a preservative like formaldehyde?
All I know is it wasn’t good luck for the rabbit.
I guess they’re just hung and left to dry, like beef jerky. Any volatile preservative, like alcohol or formaldehyde, would have evaporated long since.
There are directions to be found out there, commonly suggesting that you soak the foot in alcohol for a couple days, followed by a soak in borax solution, rinse and let dry:
They may be dried in a dehydrator, just like the kind used to make jerky, or at any rate, homemade jerky. We have one so we can make cereal marshmallows from vegan marshmallows from the store for our son. We add them to Alpha-Bits (which is kosher), and he gets the joy of cereal with little marshmallows.
I had one once. It was dyed blue, and I didn’t click that it was a real rabbit’s foot (I got it as a carnival prize) until I realized it had bones that felt just like the bones in my cat’s foot, so maybe it has some of the chemicals used to preserve hides and fur used in taxidermy. I was horrified when I realized it was real, and buried it in the back yard.
ETA
Something like formaldehyde might be better, I suppose, but for something as small as a rabbit’s foot, which also has little muscle tissue, a procedure like that, using easily obtained household substances would probably be adequate.
Wow, I assumed that the rabbit’s foot charms were just called that after a resemblance to a rabbit’s foot, not that they were actually made out of them. Even if they had maybe been made out of them long ago, I would have thought it would be much cheaper to make imitation ones anyway.
they are a re-purposing of something from the rabbit fur/meat industry that would just be thrown away otherwise.
Wiki suggests that modern day rabbit’s foot novelties may, in fact, be fake fur over latex “bones”, but some are real. As observed above, the feet would be a by-product of meat packing and the fur industry. Not enormous industries, particularly since wearing of fur has plummeted, but I doubt that a lot of rabbit foot charms are sold either. When fur was commonly worn, rabbit was a cheap fur that most people could afford, and a lot of it was sold, not even counting rabbit fur dyed and passed off as something else.
Formaldehyde smells awful and is a potential carcinogen. There would be no reason to use it. Formalin (a solution of formaldehyde and water) is used to preserve specimens mainly if you don’t want to dry them out. The procedures described of drying the foot with alcohol and then rubbing it with borax would be much better. When preparing study skins for scientific study, the standard practice is to rub them well with borax and dry them.
It is rather like Frog’s Legs on the menu…
And it had four of em!
Animal feet don’t generally have a lot of ‘meat’ to them anyway. Consider that nearly all of the muscles for moving your hands are actually located in your forearm - the hand (or paw/foot in non-human mammals) is mostly bones, tendons and ligaments - the latter two of which will dry out to tough, horn-like material.
the people I know in the rabbit industry just dry the feet, they don’t bother with any chemicals. Natural mummies.
If they’re mummies wouldn’t they be more likely to carry a curse than bestow good luck?
This thread reminds me of this routine:
OK. first, get a rabbit. But seriously, what do they do with the rest of the rabbit? I picture footless rabbits sitting in those wooden carts with blocks in their …hands… pulling themselves along on the sidewalk.
From a site on rabbits:
Eating rabbit used to be as common as eating chicken, especially during the Great Depression. After that, most of our meat started to be produced on factory farms so beef, pork, and chicken became the most common meats. Commercial farms had to decide between rabbits or chickens. In the end, chickens won out because it is easier to de-bone their breast meat. The rabbit loin is the comparable cut on a rabbit.
DID YOU KNOW: Rabbit has the highest protein and lowest fat & cholesterol of all meats. It is also the most digestible. The US Department of Agriculture has stated that domestic rabbit meat is “the most nutritious meat known to man”. Look at the chart below for USDA meat comparisons:
Meat Type % Protein % Fat Calories per lb.
Rabbit 20.8 4.5 795
Chicken 20.0 17.9 810
Turkey 20.1 20.0 1,190
Lamb 15.7 27.7 1,420
Beef 16.3 28.0 1,440
Pork 11.9 45.0 2,050
Rabbits are kind of hard to raise en masse on factory farms for some reason, but there are a lot of small backyard farmers who raise and sell rabbits for meat and fur. It’s a pretty economical way to raise meat for home use. Rabbits are quiet, non-smelly, and easily kept in small hutches. And they breed like rabbits. I’ve strongly considered adding them to my livestock collection. Much easier to skin a rabbit than pluck a bird.
One rabbit farmer I know sells the cast-off dried ears and feet as dog chews, kind of like bully sticks (dried steer penises) and pigs ears.
There are instances of people dying or getting ill, due to eating only rabbit. Not enough fat. We do need fats of various varieties.