March 30, 1999
The Vancouver Sun
By: Nicholas Read

Easter Is Time To Reconsider The Rabbit
Why do we find ourselves once and for all whether rabbits are food or companions?

Surely at this time of year more than any other, we can spare a thought for the rabbit. A traditional Easter symbol because of its fecundity, our feelings about rabbits are far more complex and contradictory than they are about almost any other so-called domestic animal.

Yes, complex. Think about it. Polite society has no firm place for rabbits, the way it has for dogs and cats on one end of the spectrum, and cows and pigs on the other. They don't neatly fit anywhere.

Dogs and cats, western mores dictate, belong curled up on cushions or in front of fireplaces with doting humans catering to their every spoiled whim. Yes, we use them in grisly medical experiments,, and we destroy millions of them in shelters, but society disapproves of that. We prefer not to know about the experiments so science, with the convenient connivance of government, keeps them secret. The shelter deaths are regarded as tragic wastes.

Cows and pigs, while every bit as individual as dogs and cats, and certainly every bit as capable of suffering, are the stuff of dinner. They are reared under the worst of conditions with almost no regard paid their basic physiological needs, and their only reprieve is death in an abattoir, hung up by their hind legs with their throats cut.

Rabbits, however, "belong" in neither camp and in both. Society would just as soon cuddle a "Bunny" with one hand as it would kill a hare with the other. It's a dichotomy illustrated best in Michael Moore's documentary film, Roger and Me. A woman hard up for cash has rabbits to sell. "pets or meat," she advertises. Let the buyer choose.

But we don't--or can't. At the same time rabbits are cherished like friends in such stories as Watership Down and Peter Rabbit, they are hunted like vermin everywhere wild populations live. We'd scream bloody murder if we saw a puppy hung up in a butcher shop, but a rabbit carcass, though offensive to some eyes, is acceptable.

Cross the road and you wouldn't be hard-pressed to find live rabbits (admittedly of a slightly different variety) for sale next to the kittens. In animal shelters too.

Pets or meat? We refuse to decide.

Yet for reasons that are unclear to me, we have decided about other domestic animals. Dogs are pets; cows are meat. Cats are companions; pigs are pork. Why? Perhaps the answer lies somewhere in our relationship with the rabbit, so cute and cuddly to some members of society, and such a prolific pest to others.

It's not unlike the dilemma presented to children introduced to a world of animals by their parents. "Nice kitty," they're instructed, "don't pull the puppy's tail." "But finish your hamburger or there'll be no TV tonight." What sense can that make to them or anyone else? Why do some of our fellow creatures deserve kindness and respect when the best others can hope for is a sharp blade and a chopping block?

Somewhere the bunny is the bridge. Loved by some, despised by others, worthy of a thought by everyone. They prove that there are no absolutes, just a continuum beginning with humans and ending...how can anyone presume to say?