One of our neighbor’s once kept free-range rabbits. She fed them and gave them a house, but they just sort of wandered around.
One day, I found one huddled under my car just before I left for work. I had no trouble picking it up, and it didn’t seem right so I took it to a vet who diagnosed a compaction, cleared her out, and we took her home with us a couple days later. We adopted her and kept her indoors after that; she wasn’t young (the neighbor didn’t care; she wasn’t eating them or anything, she just like rabbits).
I have a couple of points here:
- Vet said rabbits aren’t very robust, and it was likely she’d have just died by the next day if we hadn’t brought her in
- Her being mostly domesticated helped me get ahold of her, probably contributing to her surviving that episode.
I don’t know if there’s a moral. Except maybe that sometimes if they let you get close it’s because they’re too sick to flee.
i mean rabbits and hares literally spend their lives on our lawns, i feel like trying to keep them wild at this point is just denying reality. These urban animals have just filled a new evolutionary niche that we created, the only way to prevent it is to stop living like we do. Their wild state is to not fear humans anymore.
IMO we might as well just embrace it and try to actively integrate them into society, manage and work with them rather than pretend they’re wild animals, much like how some people treat orbweaver spiders where they actively move them to spots they can set up their net and keep the house bug-free.
I would rather share my cubical space with a rabbit than a human, any day. Just watching them try to type out Java object factories with generics would be hilarious.
(Note, am not Java developer, nor do I work in a cubicle. But if I did…)
Thank you for adding to this discussion, this is a very good comment.
Those are good concerns and definitely something to keep in mind but I’m 99.999% confident that the specific bun pictured is absolutely fine and is very much still mobile, that it was just more sluggish than usual due to overeating. It was posed, alert, and ready to bounce away at high speed if I had gone closer instead of keeping on my usual path. It was gone when I passed by again a little later.
In general, I don’t personally approve of handling real wild animals, and would not intervene in its demise unless there was a very good reason to do so.
I respect that! That’s a personal ethical decision, to intervene or not, but most naturalists I think believe it’s best to not interfere as you upset the balance - you’re at least depriving something of a meal or may need to survive if you intervene.
In our case, we knew Mrs. Bun was a semi-domesticated bunny; my wife would feed her rabbit treats by hand, of she was in our yard. And if an any animal is injured obviously because of humans - birds striking a window, for example - I’ll intervene and try to save the animal. But I wouldn’t try to stop a fox from taking a rabbit; that’s nature doing its thing. I would stop a coyote from taking one of our cats - if we let them outside, which we don’t - but that’s saving family.
Humans and our complex ethical and moral structures, huh?
Not because it is acclimated to humans but because its bloated and needs to lay down on its bun couch for a while.
