All ear and eye, the rabbit was as alert as an exclamation mark. It remained still and watchful, as if it thought it was invisible when in fact its attention was so intense it seemed as obvious as a warning beacon in an otherwise languid August afternoon.
The young rabbit was assessing the distance of this particular threat – two people and a dog – the distance to the burrow in the hedge, an escape route across the field, the position of the other rabbits, other potential threats from land and sky.
It was mapping all this through sight, sound and smell: a three-, perhaps four-dimensional landscape in which an additional rabbit-sense – a prey species instinct for survival, developed over millennia – shaped its existence in the world.
Originating in the Iberian peninsula, Oryctolagus cuniculus – hare-like digger of underground tunnels – was domesticated by the Romans, brought to Britain by the Normans and farmed for centuries in extensive warrens.
Around the 18th century, when people began to see the countryside here as an intimate, bucolic scene of picturesque beauty, rabbits were let loose into it – and into new Europes constructed by colonists in various parts of the world. Guns, snares, traps, dogs, disease – these were the rewards for rabbit success.
Coneys – the name for adult rabets – were meat for humans. Today few people eat them and predators that were once persecuted as vermin for trying to take them now can.
Weasels, stoats, polecats, buzzards, foxes and badgers all like a bit of rabbit, and many more species survive on their remains and the gardening effects of their grazing. Without rabbits there would be even less wildlife in this sanitised, over-managed, picturesque idyll.
What, then, is rabbit-world like? The one we watched watching us was already part of a complex society with hierarchies, territories, shared responsibilities and individual lives. It was taking its sentry duty seriously, protecting its community, and had the makings of a dominant adult – if it survived long enough. What it would do in the next 10 seconds could well determine that fate.
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