Where have all the rabbits gone?

It’s spring and in this corner of rural Sussex, the bluetits are at the window, newborn lambs are bleating in their pens, and all the rabbits are dead. The burrows are still there, but the chewed grass, the little collections of brown pellets, the white bobtails scattering before your headlights at night, they are gone.

I first noticed this in spring 2020, when the ancient nest of burrows in our local woods was suddenly empty. Around that time of year, the scores of rabbits gingerly setting out for the evening made a great meal for the fox cubs who first showed their faces around Easter. Both predators and prey have mostly disappeared. It turns out rabbits were also facing their own pandemic.

As RHD takes hold, fox and buzzard numbers decline too, indicating rabbits’ key role in the food chain

As with Covid, rabbit haemorrhagic disease (RHD) was first spotted in China, wiping out the country’s domestic and wild rabbit population. Now it has descended on Europe. Various strains of the disease have appeared since the 1980s; at one point, RHD was regarded as having a 100 per cent mortality rate. But it is the new strain, RHD2, that seems to be causing the damage. Our local farmer described to me the grim inevitability of spotting a new litter of baby rabbits, knowing that in a few weeks he will find them kicking in the dust. They are victims of an ebola-type disease which devastates their internal organs and causes them to bleed internally. Thankfully, for domestic rabbits at least, there is a vaccine.

We have an oddly charming view of rabbits, despite their status as an invasive species. It’s not just the familiar rabbits of Watership Down and Beatrix Potter; rabbits also take us back to our pre-Christian roots, when their feet were symbols of good luck, and they accompanied the Saxon goddess Eostre as she brought fertility to the land each spring.