Processing Meat Rabbits

I am in the process of building the cages to start up a small personal rabitry here in southern, va. I have done tons of research but I cannot figure out what people do with the head and brain?

My main purpose is to raise them for dog food, including dehydrating the ears and feet for treats and using some of the organs to meet the daily required amount of organ meat. However, I like the idea of not wasting any of the rabbit, so what do you guys do with each part of your rabbit, more specifically the parts that not many people talk about?

I have heard (maybe here? might be worth searching) of people freezing the heads until they have a goodly amount and then pressure cooking the heck out of them and then giving that to the dogs. I haven't started my production (don't really have the time right now, and I'm still hung up on the best means of dispatch. Air gun is the best idea so far but it is surprisingly expensive [I could buy many bales of hay with the money an air pistol would cost me] and I'm not entirely sure they will be strong enough...) more research is necessary.
I could see pressure cooking the heads and paws as dog food, and using the organs as supplements. I don't see having the time to cure hides and that is another thing I'm stuck on (like you, I hate the idea of wasting things).

I have not read up on this, I however have observed wild birds pick and peck at heads to get most of the material out. The brain usually goes to maggots which probably are eaten by the birds eventually....think eagle/raven/vultures.

My chickens kind of peak at the heads i give them(sheep/goat). They don't really put to much effort into it however and most of it rots on the ground and than maggots form and i flip the head over and the chickens peck at those white fatty yummy things.

When i had 2 pig heads i made stock out of them. Let me tell you it was some of the best stock i have ever made! , with the leftover meat going to the chickens/cat.

My suggestion would be to collect... say about 6 heads and put them into a stock pot with some apple cider vinegar for an hour along with onion/carrot/celery and cook them at a slow boil for half a day. Once it is done, take the meat/brains off and than feed these to the dogs. the stock could be eaten by you or it could be fed directly to the dogs, i am sure they would love it...

We just throw the heads to the dogs, too, unless we want to keep the skull.  There's no reason that I'm aware of to not feed it to the dogs.  Tons of good nutrition right there!  Dogs and cats love brains!

Edit:  We save hides and such, so we just skin, clip off the feet, and throw the rest to the dogs.  We don't gut or bleed them out. The dogs will eat 100% of the entire animal, they adore rabbits.  It's a wonderful whole prey model meal for them!  There's literally no reason to bother dissecting the rabbit for your dogs.  No need to bother with removing organs to ration them.  A whole rabbits is a whole meal, just as nature intended.  Blood, bones, tripe, brains, eyeballs- the only thing they're missing out on is the fur you've taken off if you skin it first.    The contents of the guts are one of the dogs' favorites.  They get lots of nutritious green matter in their "rabbit spaghetti", especially if your buns are fed fresh fodder and dried hay.  It's the first thing our dogs eat, every time.   For our 70lb~ dogs, 1 large rabbit = about 2 days of food.  For the 100+lb dogs, 1 rabbit per day about suffices, with occasional lapses in days where they still had some left over from the day before.   Edited repeatedly because my typos are out of control today, haha.

You can give them to the dogs, whole.
Whenever I have a dispatch session, I just toss the "waste" materials in a bucket, which I dump in the pigs' trough after I'm done. They do a good job of cleaning it all up.

If you have chickens or raise fish, I would strongly suggest Black Soldier Fly larvae bins.  You can put just about anything in them and the larvae will compost and for the most part self regulate.  Nothing goes to waste, and you have free chicken/fish feed! Hope this helps.  Best of luck in these troubling times.