Down the rabbit hole

Pie filling, pest or pet of underrated beauty, the rabbit is a mute and gregarious commoner that will nonetheless scream, fight and kill when warranted, says John Lewis-Stempel

- John Lewis-Stempel

WOULD you be a happy bunny if I rabbited on? Or shall I pull a rabbit out of the hat and hop to it? Perhaps you are caught like a rabbit in the headlights?

No surer sign of an animal’s importance exists than multiple entries in the national book of idioms. Or places named for the creature. Perhaps you are reading this article about ‘coneys’, as the European rabbit is popularly called across Britain, on Coneygar Hill, in Dawlish Warren or on Braunton Burrows?

Then again, Oryctolagus cuniculus is surely unique in being so many things to so many. Emblem of Easter and bane of Mr McGregors everywhere, the rabbit is simultaneously the anthropomorphic hero of children’s books, fur-trim, pie-filler and the nation’s third-favourite companion animal. One million pet bunnies abide with us.

Quite a record, for a relatively recent arrival to our shores—or re-arrival. Britain had its own native population of rabbits before the exterminating Ice Age and the animals were reintroduced by the Romans, but failed to flourish, only to be imported in the 12th century by the invading Normans. Peter, Flopsy, Mopsy and Cotton-tail, however, escaped the Norman meat-and-fur farm and bred in the wild like… rabbits. By the 1950s, the British countryside pitter-pattered under the paws of 100 million individuals.

Hippity-hopping over the lawn in the evening, velvet nose a-twitch, the rabbit is a furry bundle of cuteness. How does such a meek being conquer the countryside? To understand the rabbit’s success story, one needs, like Alice in Wonderland, to pop down the rabbit hole.