I have been doing some reading on this. It kinda depends on your zoning laws, food preferences, and lots of other stuff.
One thing though, I have eaten both chicken and rabbits. I prefer the taste of chicken. While it is good to have chickens for eggs, I was recently reading a book about backyard poultry raising.
By purchasing a few chicks in March or April, you can have chickens for slaughter in September. You don’t have to skin them, and they have gizmos to make plucking the feathers pretty easy. I would be more able to handle this than skinning the rabbit I think.
If you are also gardening, the chickens will clean up your garden for you and help control insects. Plus, you can make some decent money selling them locally for just a small investment of time during the 8 months, if you raise a few extra to sell. We have a big market for that here - not so much for rabbits.
Both rabbits and chickens provide good manure for the garden which can also be sold for a profit, if you have no use for it.
I like the idea of being able to process all the chickens and freeze them or can them, and be done with it during the cold winter months. With Rabbits people usually tend them year round, and they reproduce continually.
A book I am reading is Pastured Poultry Profits by Joel Salatin.
Thank you for your feedback. You’re right, I’d never heard of slaughtering all in the fall instead of maintaining a henhouse thru winter. Sure simplifies things, doesn’t it?
My best friend & I have watched shows on rabbit butchering, which is actually pretty easy. He’s put it into practice several times to halt predation in his garden. Tho wild rabbits hardly have enough meat to bother with, investment in meat rabbits would indeed mean overwintering the breeders.