A Rabbit Tale
by Susan Lumpkin
Realizing there’s no such thing as the Easter Bunny creates a crisis of faith. If there’s no Easter Bunny, could there be no Tooth Fairy, or Santa Claus, or the Man in the Moon? We rarely recover from this shock sufficiently to wonder why anyone would tell such a far-fetched story in the first place. Think about it: a rabbit delivering colored eggs and candy door to door to help Christians celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
It’s almost as incomprehensible as grown men panting over Playboy Bunnies. What is aphrodisiac about a pair of false ears and a fluffy tail? Stranger still is that the Easter Bunny and Playboy Bunny evolved from the same ancestor.
Which might not have been a rabbit at all, but a hare.
The word Easter comes from Eastre, or Ostara, an ancient Anglo-Saxon goddess who personified the dawn. She was associated primarily with spring and fertility, as life is reborn each spring after northern Europe’s barren winter months. A festival was held in Ostara’s honor in April, when fires were lit at dawn to protect crops from frost. In some Anglo-Saxon and German dialects, April is called Ostara’s month.
Ostara’s familiar animal was a rabbit, a symbol of fertility. Eggs, too, symbolize fertility and birth. According to one story, Ostara transformed a pet bird into a rabbit to entertain some children, and the rabbit proceeded to lay colored eggs that the goddess then gave to the kids. In another version, a small girl asked the goddess to save a bird she found nearly dead from the cold. The goddess saved the bird by turning it into a rabbit, which produced colored eggs.
When Anglo-Saxons converted to Christianity, the celebration of the resurrection of Christ was grafted onto and replaced the pagan festival—both, after all, were dedicated to the idea of rebirth—and the name survived. In fact, only in English and German is the holy day called Easter; in other European languages, the name is a derivation from the Hebrew pasach, or Passover, suggesting the day’s link to the Jewish holiday.
Some of the old symbols, such as bunnies and eggs, were brought to the United States by German immigrants. And with the American genius for gussying up any event with presents, it wasn’t long before the Easter Bunny was delivering chocolate coast to coast. Hippity-hoppity.
And it’s hardly a leap, or even a hop, from Ostara the sex goddess and her totemic rabbit to the Playboy Bunny. If the evolutionary biologists are right, sexual attractiveness is really all about fertility, the goal of all right-thinking guys being to produce as many kids as possible. So of course a rabbit makes a pretty sexy symbol. Rabbits really do breed like rabbits, after all. Linguistically, from Ostara come the words estrogen, the female sex hormone, and estrus, the technical term for heat.
The original Easter Bunny was almost certainly a hare, for one very good reason. Rabbits didn’t exist in northern Europe when those old-time Saxons were celebrating spring. In fact, rabbits weren’t recorded in England until 1235 and in Germany until 1423, although captive or domestic ones reached those places perhaps as early as Roman times. But they’ve since leapt into popular culture as deftly as they’ve spread across the continents.
A Rabbit by Any Other Name . . .
. . . is probably a hare. Unless it really is a rabbit. Or a pika, which some call rock rabbits or whistling hares. Some animals called rabbits or hares are not. For instance, the Patagonia hare (Dolichotis patagonum) is a mara—a large rodent, as is the springhare (Pedetes capensis) of Africa.
In any case, pikas, rabbits, and hares belong to the mammalian order Lagomorpha. As a group, the Lagomorpha have long puzzled biologists. Linneaus classified them as rodents, and there they stayed until the beginning of the 20th century, when they were placed in a separate order considered most closely related to rodents. Later, some scientists suggested a closer affinity between lagomorphs, ungulates, and elephant -shrews than between lagomorphs and rodents. Most recently, a 1998 genetics study indicated that the group is most closely related to primates and tree shrews. Stay tuned.
All lagomorphs possess short tails, hind feet larger than forefeet, and unique, peg-like teeth that grow behind the large front incisors. Lagomorphs are herbivorous, living on grasses and herbaceous vegetation, as well as "vegetables" like the carrots favored by Bugs Bunny. They also exhibit coprophagy: literally, eating feces.
Lagomorphs produce two kinds of feces. The first kind is basically a first-cut, digestively speaking, from which some but not all nutrients have been extracted. This gooey black feces is eaten as soon as it is excreted, and then re-digested in a special part of the stomach. This second round of food processing extracts more nutrients, and the final-cut feces is in the form of small, hard pellets.
Andrew Smith, an Arizona State University biologist who has studied pikas for more than 20 years, told me that Central Asian folk medicine includes a brew of pika-pellet tea that is prescribed to treat rheumatism. The food writer M.F.K. Fisher, in A Cordiall Water: A Garland of Odd and Old Receipts to Assuage the Ills of Man & Beast, relates learning from a Kansas girl the following recipe for reducing a fever: "Gather plenty of turds from the wild jackrabbit, and dry them in the oven to keep for winter in a jar. When the fever will not break, make a very strong tea of the dung and hot water, strain it, and drink it every half hour until the sweating starts. This never fails."
Within the Lagomorpha, rabbits and hares comprise the family Leporidae, while 28 or so species of pikas (also called mouse hares or conies) form the family Ochotonidae. Pikas are smaller than leporids, ranging from just 4.5 to 14 ounces. Their ears are petite and round, their legs short, and their eyes small. Also referred to as "calling hares," most pikas are active during the day and highly vocal. The steppe pika’s (Ochotona pusilla) screams are reputed to carry four miles. About half of the pika species live on talus (loose rocks) above ground; the rest use burrows. To escape predators, pikas drop out of sight among the rocks or scramble into their burrows.
Scientists now mostly agree that the word "hare" applies only to the 29 or so species in the genus Lepus, while "rabbit" describes about 26 species in 10 different genera—the largest number occupying the genus Sylvilagus, the North American cottontails. This is fine for scientists, of course, who actually refer to these animals in daily conversation as, for example, Lepus californicus (the black-tailed jackrabbit,a hare) or Caprolagus hispus (hispid hare, or bristly rabbit). For the casual observer, hares are bigger than rabbits, with longer legs and prolonged ears usually tipped in black fur. Many rabbits use burrows and retreat underground to escape danger, while hares run away, at sustained speeds of up to 30 miles per hour—and even faster in short bursts. Antelope jackrabbits (Lepus alleni) have been clocked at nearly 45 miles per hour.
The word "bunny" is mostly a child’s word, applied to either rabbits or hares. Bugs Bunny, for instance, is clearly a hare. In fact, Bugs first appeared in 1940 in a film called "A Wild Hare." Trix® cereal’s silly rabbit looks more like a hare, too. Bunnicula the vampire bunny, however, is most definitely a rabbit.
Rabbits are born in a nest of hair and grass in a burrow or special depression on the ground. In some species, the rabbits dig their own burrows; in others, they use burrows abandoned by other animals. Baby rabbits are called kittens. They are altricial, being born naked and helpless, with their eyes shut. Hare babies, called leverets, are born precocial: fully furred, open-eyed, and ready to go. Some rabbits live in groups, while hares are generally solitary. Pikas live in small family groups, and their young too are altricial.
Where in the World?
Most pikas are native to alpine and steppe habitats in Asia. Just two species occur in western North America, and a European population of Asia’s steppe pika was recently unearthed in Russia.
Rabbits and hares occur naturally just about everywhere except Antarctica, Australia, New Zealand, Madagascar, and smaller islands. People, however, have made them ubiquitous, infesting most of the lagomorph-less world with one species or another. At least 800 islands, for instance, have at some time been seeded with European rabbits. The first recorded translocation of rabbits was around 1400-1300 BC, when Neolithic Iberians took them to the island of Minorca.
Australia’s problems with introduced rabbits are legendary, but not unprecedented. The Aussies really should have known better. According to the ancient geographer Strabo, who lived from 58 BC to AD 20, a pair of rabbits introduced to the Balearic Islands multiplied to such astonishing numbers that the besieged residents petitioned the Roman Emperor to send troops to kill the rabbits or at least cart them away. In this century, a lighthouse keeper released rabbits on Washington’s San Juan Island, where their tunnels soon threatened the lighthouse with collapse. Despite the proven risks posed by introducing European rabbits where they don’t belong, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) still encourages villagers in developing countries to acquire and raise rabbits for meat.
Until people started transporting them around, European rabbits were found only on the Iberian Peninsula and the south of France. The Phoenicians who arrived in Iberia in about 1100 BC found rabbits in abundance. However they confused these unfamiliar animals with African hyraxes. So the Phoenicians named the area i-shepan-im, "island of the hyraxes," from the Semitic word for hyrax, shapan, meaning one who hides. From i-shepan-im the Latin name Hispania evolved.
These rabbits were the last of several species of Oryctolagus that once lived more widely in Europe, but had been forced into their southern refugia during the glaciations of the Pleistocene. It’s quite possible that if people hadn’t gotten into the act, the species might still be confined to these parts. Indeed, most rabbit species have quite small natural ranges, and while European rabbits breed prolifically once they’re somewhere even remotely hospitable, they don’t usually spread to new areas quickly. It took about 700 years, for example, for rabbits to conquer all of Britain. Australia is the exception to the rule. Under near-perfect conditions, rabbits here advanced at rates of up to 185 miles a year in the most favorable habitats.
But people did get involved, for one very good reason: As the FAO knows, rabbits make a good meal. Archeologists have evidence of people hunting rabbits in the south of France 120,000 years ago; undoubtedly, hominids were eating lagomorphs earlier than that. Romans began systematically exporting rabbits (Oryctolagus sp.) from Iberia to the Mediterranean islands and Italy, and eventually to all parts of the empire. Romans kept rabbits, hares, and often deer and birds in leporia: enclosed spaces several acres in size. Sometimes a small island served as a leporia, without the attendant cost of building a walled enclosure. Within the enclosure, it was an easy task to snatch up a meal as needed.
The Romans did not domesticate rabbits, however. They simply caught them, held them, and ate them. Many rabbits escaped from the leporia—not so hard given the animals’ ability to burrow under and out—and these were likely the least tame individuals. Most escapees were probably taken by predators, but a few survived to begin wild populations far from their native haunts. As people transformed the European landscape from forest to farm, the decline of predators further abetted the spread of rabbits.
Medieval French monks are credited with domesticating rabbits between A.D. 500 and 1000. The monks had very special needs, apart from a taste for rabbit meat. At a time in Catholic Europe when even lay people had more fast days on the calendar than not, fetal or newborn rabbits—long a delicacy—were deemed "fish" by the Church authorities. Thus, monks could eat quite well on "laurices." For the monks to monitor pregnant females and be on hand at the moment of birth, the laissez-faire Roman style of keeping rabbits had to go. The monks instead kept their rabbits in smaller, high-walled and paved courtyards, forcing the rabbits to breed and give birth on the grounds.
With greater control, selective breeding eventually produced larger animals. Domestics are now twice or more the size of the original Iberian rabbit. Breeds of various colors didn’t appear until perhaps the 16th century, and fancy breeds were created fairly recently.
Today, domestic rabbits have smaller brains, poorer vision and hearing, larger litter sizes, and are less timid than their wild cousins. Domestic rabbits still escape or are released from captivity quite often, and some manage to survive and reproduce. Released or escaped rabbits of fancy breeds usually quickly revert to the wild type. Eventually, wherever people take them feral populations are likely to appear.
During the age of exploration sailors released rabbits, as well as pigs and goats, on far-flung oceanic islands so that crews on passing ships could stop for a bit of fresh meat. Sealers continued this practice into the 19th century. More recent rabbit introductions, such as those in Australia and New Zealand, have been for sport first, and for food only secondarily. European hares were also introduced to Australia, but less successfully than in South America.
These introductions have usually had devastating effects on the native flora and fauna, most famously in Australia. From a handful of individuals released in the 19th century, rabbits in enormous numbers soon marched across vast swathes of southern Australia like a hungry barbarian army. If the rabbits didn’t exactly sack, they certainly did pillage. Farmers and ranchers were helpless to protect their crops and pastures from these little eating machines. Native species, such as the bilby (Macrotis lagotis)—a burrowing marsupial also called the rabbit-eared bandicoot—and the boodie (Bettongia lesueur), the only burrowing kangaroo, disappeared, eaten and driven out of house and home. Australians today are still trying to control their bunny outbreak.
Sport hunting of both hares and rabbits has a long tradition, as does using them as bait in coursing. A story is told of a battle fought between Scythians and Persians in 512 BC in which a hare was released between the opposing forces, and soldiers on both sides deserted their posts to hunt it. Ancient Greeks hunted hares with dogs, creating a special breed that is still used for this task today: greyhounds. Hares and rabbits remain the most popular game animals in the United States and across Europe.
Hares have been food as long as rabbits have, although their meat is very different. Hare meat, for instance, is dark, while rabbit meat is white and less strong in taste. Some cooks serve hare rare like beef, while rabbit is always well-done, like chicken, which it resembles in taste. Older cookbooks, written without regard to the benefits of a low-fat diet, recommended "larding" your rabbit before cooking it. (For the non-foodie, this means embedding extra fat—often via strips of bacon—into the meat.) Today, however, rabbit meat is pushed as a low-fat, low-cholesterol alternative to chicken and pork.
Prodigious Prey
Chinese legend has it that the moon is inhabited by a white hare. The explanation goes something like this: Three wise men took on the guise of old beggars and asked a fox, a monkey, and a hare for something to eat. Even though they had food to offer, the fox and monkey declined to share. The hare had nothing to give so it leapt into a fire, cooking itself to make a meal for the poor old men. The animal was rewarded for its sacrifice with an exalted position in the heavens.
The biological truth in this story is that everyone, and everything, eats lagomorphs. And I mean everything. In Spain, biologists report about 40 different species that eat Iberian rabbits. This list includes four reptiles, 19 birds of prey (including the endangered imperial eagle, Aquila heliaca—a huge raptor with a wing span of about seven feet), and 17 mammals, including the critically endangered Iberian lynx (Lynx pardina).
Fewer than 800 lynx survive in ten isolated areas on the Iberian peninsula. According to the World Wildlife Fund, the Iberian lynx is the most endangered of all the cats. This predator is highly dependent on rabbits, and the two species are believed to have evolved together. Between 75 and 95 percent of the Iberian lynx’s dietary intake is rabbit, and a lynx’s daily energy needs can be satisfied by a single, two-pound bunny. Declining rabbit numbers, largely due to disease and habitat conversion, are believed to be directly responsible for the lynx’s critical status. Lynx also die in snares people set to trap rabbits—which in Spain, as elsewhere, are highly prized by both hunters and diners.
North American lynx (Lynx canadensis) are also tightly linked to a lagomorph: the snowshoe hare (Lepus americanus). Naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton wrote of the North American lynx: "It lives on rabbits, follows the rabbits, thinks rabbits, increases with them, and on their failure dies of starvation in the unrabbited woods." Every ten years or so, populations of snowshoe hare drop suddenly, for unknown reasons perhaps related to changes in their food supply. Lynx must search over larger areas to find enough to eat; reproductive rates decline, and many lynx starve. Gradually, however, snowshoe hare populations begin to recover, and then the lynx population follows—before the cycle begins anew.
Even where European rabbits are relative newcomers to the menu of prey species, they play an important role in maintaining predators. In Australia, three species of introduced mammals—foxes (Vulpes vulpes), cats (Felis catus), and dingos (Canis familiaris dingo)—eat rabbits almost exclusively on farm lands where native prey of this size are gone. In addition, 13 species of birds of prey depend on rabbits. Where other prey are scarce, the wedge-tailed eagle’s (Aquila audax) diet may be 97 percent rabbit. After rabbits were decimated by rabbit hemorrhagic disease in the mid-1990s, wedge-tailed eagles failed to breed for three years in a row in one region of the continent.
Controlling these rabbits as pests therefore creates a dangerous situation for many birds that now depend on them. What’s more, when rabbit numbers fall, predators seem to turn to native mammals, many of which are endangered. What a tangled web we have woven for the world’s wildlife.
While the European rabbit is one of the best studied and most ubiquitious mammals on Earth, the rest of the lagomorphs are anything but. Mexico’s Omiltemi rabbit (Sylvilagus insonus), for instance, is known from only three museum specimens collected years ago and from a more recently collected chewed-on skin.
One-quarter of all rabbit and hare species and one-fifth of all pika species fall into some category of conservation concern, from vulnerable to critically endangered. It seems paradoxical that animals that breed like rabbits are in trouble. But that is another story.
-Susan Lumpkin is Editor of ZooGoer.
ZooGoer 29(4) 2000. Copyright 2000 Friends of the National Zoo. All rights reserved.
