The Rabbit

Author of the ever-popular The Hare, Jill Mason turns her attention to the rabbit in this beautifully photographed natural history which shows the rise and fall in fortune of this ubiquitous and enduring little mammal. Includes a fascinating section on the locations of the long-forgotten commercial rabbit warrens of Britain.

The rabbit was not originally a wild animal in Britain. For a thousand years, it was an important commodity, farmed since the Dark Ages in man-made warrens for its precious meat and fur. Some escaped and thrived until, in the 1950s, they far outnumbered the human population in the UK. Then man introduced myxomatosis and killed it in the millions. And today, supermarket rabbit meat is more likely to have been imported from China than from our estimated wild population of 40 million rabbits. Jill Mason puts the currently under-rated wild rabbit back into context. With beautiful photographic illustrations by David Mason, she explains its lifecycle, its behaviour, breeding, feeding habits, its influence on the UK economy, landscape and eco-system and, above all, its incredible adaptability and resourcefulness, which brings the species back from the brink of extinction to pest proportions again and again, in all corners of the earth, from semi-desert to meadowland. With a previously unpublished reference section on the sites of the UK’s former commercial rabbit warrens.