Rabbits Wild and Free

This image copied from the Real Watership Down website, depicts a wild rabbit eating cabbage. In order to take a walk through Watership Down click here

Domestic rabbits of many varieties including "Pete" (a 'mini lop') are offspring of oryctalagus cuniculus whose ancestors were cultivated by monks in Europe many centuries ago.


R.M. Lockeley's book The Private Life of the Rabbit (click here) describes one amateur naturalist's efforts to study at close quarters the amazing social hierarchy that rabbits establish in community. Richard Adams author of Watership Down writes that he learned from Mr. Lockeley that: "[Rabbits]...I learned, have been anthropomorphically maligned. They were not unusually promiscuous and in many instances retained the same mate for life (Lockeley, 5)." Indeed it may appear that rabbits are promiscuous but upon closer examination one realizes that the exigencies of the wild---ruthless hostility to "lower" prey--- are met in the rabbit species with one surefire defense strategy: fecundity.


Yes, it has been reported that in principle two rabbits in an ideal, unchecked environment might establish 95 billion offspring in seven years. However, nature does nothing in vain, and the peaceloving, non-agressive behavior of rabbits engenders manifold predation. We may consider of all their foes man the most malignant...(isn't this true of all species threatened by man?) And yet, man brought to caring intelligence might adopt, culture, and in fact steward these little folk.


Why, you ask, should man undertake to care for and cultivate the wild rabbit? Christian monks in the Middle Ages did so for the fundamental reaon that rabbit meat is tastey and fortifying. Later of course, the rabbit was cultivated for its lovely, warm,fur in order to adorn the costumes of princes and kings!


In America today (3-24-07), rabbits are sold in pet shops, cultivated in rabbit "farms" actually soulless factories, they are deployed by the millions in research. I know this to be a fact, for I was once an undergraduate who was employed in the recesses of such research labs in technological caverns hidden in the bowels of the University of Washington, acres of primate incarceration from birth with their mothers removed in the name of academic science and research. We later learned that rabbits' acute sensitivity in eye and ear made them valuable specimens for animal research so that women's cosmetology products, and so forth might be tested first on these perfectly innocent and defenceless creatures of God. Tell me, sisters, is your perfume and hairspray that good?


Granted the research animal's life is "nasty, brutish, and short (Hobbes)" owing to man's intellectual pride and stubborn will---the rabbit as pet fares not much better.


Rabbit breeders pride themselves on their delicate breeding to render exquisitely refined rabbit coats, and inescapably cute bunnies who are fodder for American children at Easter. A well meaning youngster buys a rabbit for a friend, or a naive parent gets Little Ashley a little "furry friend" not knowing that rabbits are highly sociable, and sophisticated creatures whose care can be demanding and require more know how than raising cats and dogs. Further, local veterinarians are undertrained in rabbit medicine and unequipped to face the demands of rabbit owners when their beloved pet's symptoms appear.


Well, "what is to be done?" you say. Lockeley's book offers one possible solution---to re-introduce rabbit colonies to the "wild". Ah, but we are are told that this is tantamount to abandonment and is unethical. The alternative is to exterminate unwanted rabbits and to castrate every domestic buck and spay every doe, a forced eunochry, a small price to make the rabbit docile and radically defenceless. This campaign is wielded mightily by the ASPCA and the local chapters of the Humane Society, and in some cases, de facto, may be ethically legitimate.
However, in toto, this can never be considered as a final solution.


Since man cultivated the little beast, he must make every effort to ethically care for his charge. This is true not only of oryctalagus cuniculus but of every aspect of man's stewarding of the earth and its creatures.


He might like Mr. Lockeley re-introduce smaller rabbit colonies into broader "wild" enclosures such as monastic lands and fields where to be sure predation abounds but in a much more "humane" and ethical manner. We say 'humane' in irony. Is it 'humane' to technologically dominate an entire species of any sort, to play God, indeed, while mad interwoven legal structures abhor fair reason, mechanically incarcerating generation after generation of these innocent creatures. In fact, isn't it the case that in American Gaovernement, playing God is the only game in town!


Man, might one day attempt to be truly ethical in his stewardship of all of God's creatures great and small...Man might reasonably balance his technological mastery of the world with a bit of heartfelt care and do whatever it takes to do the right thing for the fourfooted, the winged, those who swim, leap and indeed frolic.