In a hall in Waynesville, North Carolina — a town of about 10,000 people roughly 30 miles west of its far more famous neighbor, Asheville — hundreds of rabbits waited in stacked cages while judges snatched them out one at a time, ran expert hands over fur and muscle, and called their verdicts aloud. Dozens of breeds, all competing for best in category and best in show. By mid-morning, one lesson had landed hard: winning won't necessarily turn a bunny into a star, but losing just might turn a bunny into dinner.
That turned out to be the smaller surprise of the day. The larger one is the animal itself. Being cute and fluffy and apparently harmless has helped the rabbit keep a very strange secret.
No jelly beans in the Bible
Consider the chocolate one in the basket, solid or hollow, one bright blue candy eye peering over the handle. There are no chocolate rabbits in the Bible, and when Jesus rose on the third day it was not to gobble a bag of jelly beans. How a cluster of pagan fertility symbols got welded to the most sacred holiday on the Christian calendar is a weird story all by itself.
The rabbit carries weight elsewhere, too. 2023 is the lunar year of the rabbit — what used to be called the Chinese New Year — and in Chinese folklore the rabbit stands for longevity, good fortune and harmony with nature. A geomancy consultant named Thierry Chow, who reads fortune in the arrangement of the world, told CNN that a water year plus a rabbit year adds up to a much gentler twelve months.
Luck, though, is in the eye of the beholder. You might carry a lucky rabbit's foot; the rabbit who donated that paw probably sees the arrangement differently. We take their pelts and we eat their flesh, and because they're docile, conveniently sized and physiologically close to us, we have used them in the lab for decades. We have rabbits to thank for the rabies vaccine. Rabbit research revealed the link between HPV and cervical cancer. Every cholesterol drug commercial, every COVID-19 treatment — thank the bunnies.
And then there's the saying. From the 1920s through the 1960s, a doctor tested for pregnancy by injecting a woman's urine directly into the ovaries of a small animal, most often a rabbit, then dissecting the animal to look: HCG concentrated in a pregnant woman's urine deforms rabbit ovaries. Did all those rabbits die? Every one of them, pregnancy or no. That's where "the rabbit died" comes from. Whoever invented the drugstore stick deserves a statue.
Dinner, twice
Rabbits are lagomorphs, not rodents, and rabbit people would like that on the record. The distinction is dental: four incisors in the upper jaw instead of two. The oldest rabbit ancestor we have was dug out of the ground in India in 2008 and lived about 53 million years ago — small creatures only got their real shot at the evolutionary game after the thunder lizards kept their date with the asteroid.
Lagomorphs have folds of skin on their lips that tuck behind those incisors, letting them gnaw with the mouth cavity sealed shut. Try it yourself. No amount of childhood Bugs Bunny will help you eat a carrot that way.
What goes in is stranger still. A rabbit's colon sorts food into what can be used and what can't. The usable portion heads for an organ called the cecum, where bacteria ferment it for hours, and it leaves the body as soft pellets called cecotrophs — partially digested, packed with protein and vitamins, and coated in mucus that shields them from stomach acid so the fermenting can keep going. The rabbit eats them directly as they pass. It looks like a rabbit eating its own droppings. It's closer to reheated leftovers, and it is not optional. Rabbits were built to eat everything twice.
They will also, in the wild, alter the plasticity of their jawbones in real time to suit whatever food is on offer. Bouncy little transformers.
Two cervixes and no womb
A female lagomorph has two separate uterine horns, each with its own cervix, and no uterine body at all — a bicornuate duplex uterus. It happens in humans, extremely rarely, and it makes for a high-risk pregnancy. Among mammals, the only other creatures built like this are the ones that lay eggs: the duck-billed platypus and the four species of spiny anteater.
One doe can produce as many as 60 babies a year. She doesn't go into heat; she ovulates after mating. In the wild she mates only when she chooses, and the courtship is a whole production — the buck trails her from a dozen feet back, creeps in with a cocky stiff-legged strut, hums a little song, then zooms past and squirts a little urine her way. There's mutual grooming. Then it's over in about four seconds, at which point the buck keels over unconscious. So much for the afterglow.
And if the world looks wrong — food scarce, survival threatened — a pregnant doe may simply reabsorb her litter back into her body and go on with her life.
A female rabbit's reproductive system — two uterine horns, two cervixes, no womb — is matched among mammals only by the ones that lay eggs, the platypus and the spiny anteaters. And when the world around her looks too dangerous for babies, a pregnant doe can simply reabsorb her entire litter back into her body and carry on.
Every answer was a recipe
Back in Waynesville: chicken-wire cages called judging coops, the breeder stuffing a bunny in one door, the judge pulling it out the other and narrating as he worked. Jersey Woolies like pug-faced balls of fluff. Rex rabbits so velvety one breeder promised that when you touch them, "you'll know what love is." Flemish Giants escaped from a Cadbury commercial. One Angora arrived at the coop on what looked like an AV cart from the local high school, blown out to more than two feet across, less animal than millinery.
Rabbit people are kind and patient, which is how they tolerated hours of my dumb questions. But every breeder, explaining why they loved their lops or satins or wrecks, got around to mentioning how delicious the animal was. So I asked how you eat one of your own. A man from Georgia answered with a crock pot: his friend cooked one whole, let it sit and simmer until the meat pulled off, and "made barbecue rabbit." No matter how I phrased the question, the answer came back as a recipe. The last breeder pegged me as a city person and said, "life on the farm keeps you closer to where your food comes from." Then, gently: "If they're not superstars, they're dinner."
Human enough
In August 2003, Rick Weiss reported in the Washington Post that Chinese scientists had made hybrid embryos carrying both rabbit and human DNA — mostly human, with rabbit mitochondrial DNA — aiming for a plentiful source of embryonic stem cells. They weren't implanted, and the research suggests they'd never have grown into a viable fetus. A Harvard biologist called the experiment "a big advance." A bioethicist at Wisconsin-Madison said the work had followed the guidelines and should be permitted to continue. Speaking for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, Richard Doerflinger called those embryos "human enough to merit the same protections granted human life."
Which leaves the imagination somewhere it probably shouldn't go. We bulldoze their meadows, disrupt their burrows, panic their does into ending pregnancies — and then they use our roads, our pathways, even our railway lines to spread into new territory, and raid our gardens the way Peter Rabbit raided Mr. McGregor's. The trembling ball of fluff that freezes in your yard is not lost. It knows your ways. And no matter how many you try to wipe out, they will simply make more.