As it happened, I passed by the Yours For Life event organised by the House Rabbit Society this evening. Lagomorphs probably do not bear the full brunt of human misgivings suffered by cats, that ranges from simple misunderstandings to outright hostility and communal hate. But like all creatures of domestic comfort in Singapore, they are all too often treated as toys, purchased at a moment's notice and discarded like spent rags that have soaked up whatever little attention their owners could afford.
According to the House Rabbit Society, nearly a thousand bunnies are abandoned in Singapore each year. They are left at parks, by forest reserves or simply wherever that's convenient and does not expose the owner to unwanted disapproval. Bred for generations as housepets or meat factories, domestic rabbit strains are ill-adapted to life in the wild and the animals that do not die from gnawing at pesticide-laden lawns or succumb to sheer heat and exposure end up as food for raptors, dogs, monitor lizards and other predators. When's the last time you have seen a warren here?
Rabbits and their more cursorial cousins the hares are strange beasts if one considers them at length. Herbivores by nature, they are not closely related to rodents (an important distinction is that the testes in Lapines lie in front of the penis, not behind). And for reasons that probably stem from a quirk of biogeography, the order Lagomorpha is most diverse and populous in the higher latitudes. The European rabbit is particularly fecund, and its introduction to Australia is reckoned to be a massive ecological and agricultural disaster.
Tropical or sub-tropical lagomorphs are on the other hand a precarious bunch. The African riverine rabbit is one of the world's rarest mammals. In oriental Asia, lagomorphs are restricted to fringe habitats such as the Himalayan foothills (the last refuge of the Assam rabbit), montane forests in Sumatra (home to the elusive Sumatran striped rabbit – caught on camera earlier this year) and the Annamite range on the Laotian-Vietnamese border (where the pretty little Annamite striped rabbit lives with other barely-known macroherbivores). The Japanese Amami rabbit, a relic reminscent of the group's Miocene ancestors, survives on just two islands while the volcano rabbit clings to volatile mountaintops outside Mexico City.
Moving from natural to imagined history, Peter Rabbit's Edwardian tales (whose author was banned from mycological gatherings despite her remarkable resemblance to Renee Zellweger) were never known to me during my impressionable years, which probably helps account for my duck's lack of breeding and outstanding misability to trouble unfortunate monkeys. Brer Rabbit and his tar baby were more prominent role models along with a certain carrot-chewing Bronxy varmint. A much deeper impression in the hallowed ground was left by the realpolitik of Watership Down, where Blut und Boden is the lay of the land. As Hazel's troupe comes up nose to twitching nose against the high price of placid obeisance and the brutal paranoia of total defence, human nature red in truth and law is revealed in all its glory and gloom in Adams' war of the warrens.
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