You've obviously never heard the stories about parents cooking their children's pet chickens then, have you?

my grandpa did the exact same thing to my mom, only difference was that it was made into soup

Rabbits are very popular pets

Eating rabbit is common in general. Personally I don't like it but I remember my family cooking up a rabbit stew at least once a month when we lived in Newfoundland. I live in Alberta now and good wild rabbit is harder to find due to their diet but for a lot of the people I know it is like a delicacy.

I've had rabbit. It's quite tasty. That said, if you want rabbit, you go to a market that sells exotic meats and buy one, or you raise them explicitly for food and discourage bonding with them. You don't kill and eat your child's pet, that is seriously effed up.

The family of the OP clearly knew that the rabbit that they killed and cooked up for dinner, which is what's so inexcusably and shockingly horrific about this whole thing.

I've also eaten rabbit and found it succulently tasty. But it wasn't somebody's pet that was killed, cooked and eaten. It was in a hotel restaurant. The fact that anybody could/would kill and cook somebody's cherished pet for dinner is beyond reprehensible and disgusting....it's criminal, to boot.

Mine were the same. Pet rabbits were slaughtered and eaten. At 5, I had to help hold the chickens so dad could chop their heads off. We had a calf that I played with as a child, and one day ma announced we were eating it. It was a brutally honest childhood about life and death.