What Does This Phrase in My Book Mean?

It means "adopted" -in the sense that the baby's mother is not available and there's probably not a wet nurse around, so the baby would have to take some type of animal milk or mixture from the beginning. Animals that are hand reared are raised from infancy by humans instead of their biological mothers. These days we have all sorts of fancy formulas, bottles, precise measurements and what not -but in the 16th century infant mortality was extremely high in the BEST of circumstances, so infants with no adequate breast milk to partake of were in dire shape.

My first thought was hand reared meant not breast-fed. If you couldn't breast feed, and couldn't afford a wet nurse, then your child had very little chance of surviving.

Hand-reared animals typically means drinking milk from a bottle rather than the mother, so that's how I took it.

Charles Dickens, in GREAT EXPECTATIONS, has Pip referred to as "being brought up by hand." Some people explain this as being bottle-fed - which would have been true in that case, since Pip's mother died when he was a baby and he was raised by his aunt. And Pip did feel his aunt's hand, as well as the stick in her hand, often - but that's beside the point here, I think. Dickens could have also used it to mean that the aunt took the child in rather than sending him to an orphanage.

But here's another thought. It wasn't unusual for wealthy peoples' babies to be farmed out to a "wet nurse" who took care of the baby until it was older, and then the parents took the child back into their home. A "hand reared" baby might have been one who was nursed at home by the mother rather than being turned over to a wet nurse. If the mother, after childbirth, was not healthy (standards of sanitation and general health being much lower) and lost her milk, the chances of the baby's surviving would not be great.

Anyhow, that's my guess.

Jo is right. Hand reared with animals means literally cared for in your hand, so given the time, I'd say breastfed, and raised by parents not servants. Which of course at that time meant very poor = starvation, death from disease, etc.