19 March 2022 | New Scientist | 43>Features
Save our bunnies
A mysterious viral disease is putting rabbits
in a real hole. Can they get out of it,
asks Graham Lawton
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R MCGREGOR’s only desire was to
keep Peter and his pesky playmates
off his vegetable patch – and, if he
got lucky, to make a pie out of them, according
to Beatrix Potter. Meanwhile Elmer Fudd’s
fervent wish was to put a bullet through his
arch-nemesis, Bugs.
Popular culture depicts a certain
antagonism between human and rabbit,
while often emphasising the bunnies’ role as
sassy survivors. But having already seen off
one huge existential threat in the past century,
the viral disease myxomatosis, rabbits now
face another horrendous adversary, rabbit
haemorrhagic disease virus, or RHDV. At the
same time, we have come to realise that rabbits
aren’t just fast-breeding agricultural pests, but
key to many healthy, functioning ecosystems
worldwide. “Rabbits are in a lot of trouble,”
says Pip Mountjoy at UK government agencyNatural England. “They need our help.”
The European rabbit, Oryctolagus cuniculus,
evolved around half a million years ago. It was
once widespread across Europe, including the
British Isles, before being penned into Iberia by
the last ice age. Their global expansion began
in the 1st century BC with the Romans, who
domesticated rabbits for food and fur and
spread them back across their former range.
Some say the Romans reintroduced the
rabbit to Britain, others point to the Normans.
It was definitely the British who brought them
to Australia in 1859 and New Zealand in the
1860s. A small colony established in the US in
1875 to control weeds quickly expanded across
North America. The European rabbit is now
one of the most widespread species on Earth,
living on every continent except Antarctica.
That is partly because rabbits breed like, well,
rabbits. Females are reproductively mature atthree to four months and have frequent litters
of up to six kits. A breeding pair can produce
40 kits a year, and fertile males roam widely
(see “Rabbit rules”, page 45). In the 19th and
early 20th centuries, developments such as the
planting of winter fodder crops for livestock
and the slaughter of natural predators also
boosted populations, making rabbits a
serious agricultural pest in many parts.
With shotguns, ferrets, traps and poisons
proving to be ineffective, and fences simply
burrowed under, thoughts turned to a more
dastardly method of control: biological
warfare. In the 1950s, through a mixture of
accident and intention, myxomatosis was
unleashed, almost entirely wiping out rabbit
populations, first in Australia and then in
Europe (see “Myxomageddon”, page 44).
Only then did we realise how much we
missed them. It turns out that rabbits are