The Perversion of The Easter Bunny: 1907 To Today

“Hallo, Rabbit,” he said, “is that you?”
“Let’s pretend it isn’t,” said Rabbit, “and see what happens.”
― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh (1926)

 

 

 

 

“What is so real as the cry of a child?
A rabbit’s cry may be wilder
But it has no soul.”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel

 

 

“This is a fierce bad rabbit;
look at his savage whiskers,
and his claws and his turned-up tail.”
― Beatrix Potter, The Story of A Fierce Bad Rabbit

 

 

 

 

 

 

I remember watching with my father and brother through the fence of Stanstead House, the Sussex mansion of the Earl of Bessborough, one evening in the early 1960s, and seeing an immense golden meadow carpeted entirely by grazing rabbits. I’ll never keep that quiet, or be that still, again.

This was around the time of countrywide protest against the introduction of a horrible laboratory-confected disease, named ‘myxomatosis,’ into the warrens of old England to keep down the number of nibbling rodents. Richard Adams’s lapine masterpiece Watership Down is the remarkable work that it is, not merely because it evokes the world of hedgerows and chalk-downs and streams and spinneys better than anything since The Wind in the Willows, but because it is only really possible to imagine gassing and massacre and organized cruelty on this ancient and green and gently rounded landscape if it is organized and carried out against herbivores.” ― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“You all know the argument from design: everything in the world is made just so that we can manage to live in the world, and if the world was ever so little different, we could not manage to live in it. That is the argument from design. It sometimes takes a rather curious form; for instance, it is argued that rabbits have white tails in order to be easy to shoot. I do not know how rabbits would view that application.” ― Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects

 

 

 

“Mr. McMurphy… my friend… I’m not a chicken, I’m a rabbit. The doctor is a rabbit. Cheswick there is a rabbit. Billy Bibbit is a rabbit. All of us in here are rabbits of varying ages and degrees, hippity-hopping through our Walt Disney world. Oh, don’t misunderstand me, we’re not in here because we are rabbitsーwe’d be rabbits wherever we wereーwe’re all in here because we can’t adjust to our rabbithood. We need a good strong wolf like the nurse to teach us our place.” ― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

 

 

 

 

 

“Rabbits need dignity and, above all, the will to accept their fate.” ― Richard Adams, Watership Down