Rabbit

Overview

The European rabbit is the ancestor of all domestic rabbit breeds - over 300 recognized worldwide. Originally native to the Iberian Peninsula, they were spread across Europe by the Romans and introduced globally by colonizers, becoming one of the world's most ecologically impactful invasive species in places like Australia. In the wild they live in large, complex underground warrens with strict social hierarchies.

Quick Facts

History

For decades the textbook account had rabbits domesticated at a stroke around 600 AD, when Pope Gregory the Great supposedly ruled that newborn rabbits counted as fish and could be eaten during Lent, sending French monks to breed them behind monastery walls. Asked to find the decree so it could be set against genetic data, the Oxford graduate student Evan Irving-Pease discovered that no such ruling exists. The story traces instead to a passage written in 584 AD by Gregory of Tours about a man who ate young rabbits during Lent, misread by scholars in the mid-twentieth century. Irving-Pease and Greger Larson published the correction in Trends in Ecology and Evolution in 2018, arguing that domestication is a long process with no single starting point.

Fun Facts