Antipathy

Hares and rabbits do not fraternize. Hares feed on almost every kind of vegetation, even seaweed, mushrooms, puffballs, and the leaves of young conifers, but they will not graze on land used by rabbits. It is said that rabbits drive them off pugnaciously, but even when there are no rabbits about they will not feed there because rabbits make the grass seem foul for them, as it is for sheep, and as a pasture is for cattle after geese have been on it.

Charles Welling has seen ghastly evidence of antipathy: “What used to destroy most hares was rabbits. The buck rabbit used to go and bite the top of their heads when they found them. Of the leveret. Of the young. When you go – you find the form with three or two in it. But going back an jour later – you’d see the heads all smashed and eaten. You’d stand back and say, ‘Well, what’s done that?’ – and you’d suddenly see a buck rabbit come or a doe rabbit come, jumping out and go around and scratch them out of the nest after they’d killed them. So we’d know that that’s what they’d done.”

– Excerpted from The Leaping Hare by George Ewart and David Thomson (Faber and Faber, 1972), pp. 26-27.


Image: “Brown Hare Alerted” - Chatton Gallery.