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We lagomorph lovers learned all these things from people like Margo DeMello, president of the House Rabbit Society, and rabbit behavior educator and journalist Susan E. Davis. Their book Stories Rabbits Tell: A Natural and Cultural History of a Misunderstood Creature (Lantern, 2003) is the most comprehensive English-language study of how rabbits arrived in our backyards and our homes as pets and pests and toys and furs and food and sex symbols. The authors introduce us to biological marvels such as the curiosity Moses mentions in Leviticus and Deuteronomy: rabbits chewing their cud (not excrement but—from a separate pipe—undigested and seemingly useless material). The digestive system of rabbits showcases both divine whimsy and pragmatism. If the hay or other food rabbits ingest doesn't contain the necessary B vitamins and protein, no problem: rabbits will produce their own. (Does it make me nutty if reading about this recycling system for the first time evoked spontaneous worship?)
In Stories Rabbits Tell, we learn about the first known defenders of rabbits. Among them was William Cowper, the 18th-century poet and hymn-writer. He was severely depressed and suicidal much of his life, and John Newton of Amazing Grace fame took him into his home to watch over him. But Cowper's three hares also lifted his spirits. Davis and DeMello dug up a letter that he sent to Gentlemen's Magazine, explaining his opposition to blood sports, so fashionable in the England of his day:
You will not wonder, Sir, that my intimate acquaintance with these specimens of the kind has taught me to hold the sportsman's amusements in abhorrence; he little knows what amiable creatures he persecutes, of what gratitude they are capable, how cheerful they are in spirits, what enjoyments they have of life, and that impressed as they seem with a peculiar dread of man, it is only because man gives them peculiar cause for it.
What would Copwer think of the way commercial breeding and meat industries treat rabbits today? Thanks to the usda's Humane Slaughter Act, most animals we eat have to be stunned in order to be rendered unconscious before they are killed. Not rabbits. They aren't classified as livestock, but as poultry, which are excluded from the act. Chickens! So they suffer, demonstrably, when dying. I'll spare you the depiction. Suffice it to say that I cannot imagine a reasonably compassionate carnivore, after reading a straightforward account of the way many rabbits die, going out to enjoy a conejo dish at a tapas restaurant. But as troubling as the inhumane killing of commercially raised rabbits can be, it was the account of their living that made me weep.
While DeMello and Davis do not condemn those who eat rabbits or use cosmetics whose makers test their products on bunnies, they describe in awful detail the life-defying conditions that exist in the meat, fur, vivisection, and pet industries. It's obvious that too many rabbits spend their existence in filth, stress, and pain, without the freedom to do a binky or run (running is, after all, God's gift to rabbits) or even stand up on their hind legs or stretch their muscles.
Even "people who keep rabbits in hutches in the back yard don't get to know a rabbit's true repertory," DeMello and Davis write—"there's just not enough stimulation or physical space for the rabbit to really let go, and the keeper rarely has enough time to really observe the animal's behavior." No wonder "most people approach rabbits as if they were stuffed animals: cute but not capable of much, except maybe eating carrots and twitching their noses."
There's so much more than that. Take the behavior of Puszek, one of my two bunnies, right now. It's 1 am, two hours past my usual bedtime, and Puszek is making noise by tossing my shoes up in the air so that they fall on the hardwood floor. Is he just being a dumb bunny? Or is he saying, "What are you doing still up?"
Agnieszka Tennant can almost smell God when she nuzzles the red fur of her mini-rex rabbits Puszek and Miodka (pictured above). This fall, she will begin an international relations program at University of Chicago, hoping to figure out why such a devoutly churchgoing country as her native Poland is so corrupt.
Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today International/Books & Culture magazine.
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