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ErroneousBosh • today at 7:44 AM • 1 reply • view on HN

This sounds like absolute horseshit to me.

You're trying to say that rabbits - which breed so rapidly that we actually use the phrase "breeds like rabbits" in just about every language across the planet - were somehow a rare luxury?

Rabbits, that left unchecked will breed like crazy across any grassy-ish space that you have and which can be caught with only slightly more difficulty than for example rocks and fallen branches?

These were a rare luxury, somehow?

Bollocks they were.

Replies

defrost • today at 7:54 AM

You realise that rabbits were once so rare in Australia they had to be introduced to salve the British passion for killing small things?

The article claims:

  The European rabbit is a common sight in the British countryside today.
  Yet it was not always so. They are not native to the British Isles and are one of the most devastating invasive species.
If true, there was a time when they were so rare as to be non existent.

From that time, until at most 1555 when:

  ... the Swiss naturalist Conrad Gesner could write that "there are few countries wherein coneys (rabbits) do not breed, but the most plenty of all is in England."
there was an interstitial period of decreasing rarity.
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