The rest of the book is surprising, in that it covers virtually every aspect of rabbits you could imagine. Their history as a domesticated animal, the history and current techniques of rabbit farming for fur and meat, rabbits in mythology and culture, popular representations of the animal, rabbits used for medical testing, and on and on. Frankly, it was about 50% more info about rabbits than I had any need for, and I skimmed over much of the book, but the opening section on rabbits as pets was very interesting, and the book as a whole is a valuable archive of history and information, especially if you're more interested in the information than I was.

To the scores:

Stories Rabbits Tell, A Natural and Cultural History of a Misunderstood Creature, by Susan E. Davis and Margo DeMelle
Concept: 7
Presentation: 7
Writing Quality: 6
Presents/Explains the Topic Clearly: 7
Entertainment Value: 4
Rereadability: 3
Overall: 6

I had trouble rating this book, since while lots of the info in it was excellent, and it was obvious that the authors did a tremendous amount of research, I wasn't actually all that interested in most of it. Someone who wanted to know about rabbits in mythology and history would find the 60 or 70 pages devoted to that subject invaluable. I didn't care, and skimmed over them quickly. So while my scores for entertainment value and re-readability aren't very high, I can easily imagine someone else giving this book 8s or 9s in those categories.

The Amazon.com reader reviews display an interesting divide. Of the 20 reviews posted there now, about 15 are 4 or 5 stars from people who love rabbits and loved the book. The other 5 or so are from commercial rabbit breeders who give the book 1 star and say all the info about commercial rabbit breeding is misleading bullshit. They (the rabbit breeders) also seem to be pissed that the authors quote numerous actual exchanges taken from various Yahoo rabbit breeder chat groups, and they complain that the authors didn't tell the truth about who they were or why they were monitoring the chat. (As if the rabbit breeders would have so cavalierly joked about their cruel rabbit killing and raising techniques if they'd known they were being read by outsiders with a book under production?)

It's also interesting that hardly anyone comments on the rest of the book, since the rabbits as pets part and the rabbits raised for food parts are each about 1/5 of the book. The other 3/5 of the book covers rabbits in mythology, rabbits in product testing, rabbits in popular culture, and much more. It's a surprisingly-thorough book, one that isn't as good as the rabbit lovers claim, but one that's far better than the defensive rabbit breeders assert.

My take on the rabbit raising and animal testing sections of the book is pretty simple. They're unpleasant to read, but anyone who knows anything about how animals are raised for slaughter can't really be surprised to hear how it is for rabbits. Of course the people breeding the animals wean the kits as young as possible, and of course they breed the does again as soon as possible and of course they raise them in the smallest cages possible to save on space and money. That's how economics and profit decrees that every animal raised for meat is treated, and if you somehow think that rabbits are treated especially poorly, as described in the book, you really need to read some more info about cow, pig, chicken, and other animals are raised for the slaughter. Rabbits have it pretty damn good, really.

Unlike most other meat crops, they're not fed other ground up rabbits to save money, they're not fed amphetamines to keep them awake and eating for most hours in the day, they're not fed megadoses of antibiotics to keep them alive long enough in their unsanitary and overcrowded conditions to get big enough to be slaughtered, and so on. I found the dryly-presented info about rabbit breeding for meat in no way surprising, though I was surprised at the complete lack of regulatory oversight. Apparently the rabbit meat industry isn't large enough for the USDA to be involved in any way, and since most breeders are small family operations that don't have that many rabbits and don't have a very high value, they're below the radar for food safety inspections.

The fact that people were upset reading about those techniques as they are described in the book, or that the breeders felt they had to post Amazon.com reviews to deny what they're doing, just shows how far from the farm most Americans (and other people in industrialized societies) have grown. Of course animals are grown in crowded, miserable conditions, of course they have horrible lives, and of course they're slaughtered painfully. You either go buy organic, small-farm, free range meat, or you go vegan, or you eat the cheap stuff and accept that you are directly contributing to the horrible lives and deaths of animals. But at least be honest with yourself about it.

I don't mean to make the book sound humorless and ugly though, since the opening segments about rabbits as pets are delightful, charming, and very entertaining. Neither author is very good at telling a story or communicating the emotion and fun rabbit owners get from their pets, but even their dryly factual retellings were fun to read, and the antics described were quite funny. There is also some funny stuff in the rabbits as food part, though I don't think they meant it to be amusing. I laughed though, as they talked about how rabbit meat is virtually unsellable in whole form, since people just won't buy these cute bunny shaped skinned bodies.  The problem is that since rabbits aren't very especially the cheap, low-meat ones imported frozen from China that are depressing the market, they're not really worth the trouble to dismember for sale.

I was also amazed, if not very amused, to learn that no one has an effective, affordable, and humane rabbit killing technique. As the much-vilified quotes from the rabbit-breeder Yahoo chat groups showed, some breeders simply shoot bunnies in the head with a rifle, others try to break their necks with various semi-efficient tools, others suffocate them, others try to freeze them alive, and so on. The approved method is to lower them into a box full of dry ice so they die from quick suffocation, but the concept of these mom and pop farms in Iowa having that expensive technology on hand, farms where they're scraping by making about $1 profit per fryer, is laughable.

Equally, the vivisection chapter, detailing the horrible abuses of rabbits by the cosmetic and medical industries wasn't anything I didn't know. Bloom County did a long cartoon series on the subject years and years ago (Night of the Mary Kay Commandos), and I've long heard stories about how rabbits are confined in stocks with their eyes clipped open so they can be sprayed with oven cleaner and mascara and hair spray and all sorts of other stuff. I was surprised how poorly-done those tests are, with no real controls, most of the evaluations of product effect based entirely on subjective human observation, and how unrepeatable the results are. Different labs would use different amounts of the chemical to be tested, or use different types of rabbits, and come up with entirely different results, which made the whole exercise pretty pointless.

The most interesting thing about the book was how dispassionately the information was presented. Knowing that both authors were tender-hearted rabbit lovers, I expected them to condemn the rabbit cruelty in strong terms. They didn't, and in fact there was no editorializing at all. They simply presented the facts and history and statistics, and let the reader decide how he or she felt about it. Of course you could argue, and most of the rabbit breeders seem to be doing just that, that the info presented is inaccurate and misleading in of itself, but that's not an issue I am qualified to weigh in on. Nothing in the book rang false to me about it though; they didn't say breeders were systematically torturing rabbits for fun, and they didn't say rabbit meat was poisonous, or anything like that. Breeders of rabbits aren't necessarily bad people, they're just doing something to try and eek out a meager living on it, and while they probably feel bad about the way they have to treat their crop, they just don't have any choice.

Besides, it's very easy to be condemning and soft hearted about this sort of thing from a distance. When you're actually doing it though, you grow hardened to it almost immediately. I used to raise rats for pets and for snake food, and while my first few dead pet rats (before I had any snakes at all) broke my heart, I got over that quickly. After a few years of it I was playing with the rats and treating them well, until the babies got big and they had to be killed and/or sold to pet stores. And when adults got sick and had to be euthanized I just did it, knowing that they didn't live very long, or that I had lots of other rats coming along to take their places, or that snakes had to eat too. It's human nature; everyone is squishy about things involving death and discomfort at first, and then you grow used to it as the reality and necessity of things sinks in. Just as an example, my mom is soft-hearted about most every type of animal, but since she grew up with relatives who raised mink and her every memory is of how vicious the mink were in their cages, how bad their musk smelled, etc, she's got no interest or sympathy for those things at all, even decades later.

Kids who grow up on farms play with the chickens and the pigs and the calves, and when slaughter time comes they cry a bit as their pets are killed, but they eat the pork chops and enjoy them, and next year it's easier to let go, and so on.  Prison guards probably hate themselves for beating prisoners their first few months on the job too, but soon enough you just get used to doing whatever horrible thing you're doing, and it no longer seems unusual, whether the target of your cruelty and indifference is animal or human. Etc. 

This book doesn't delve into the psychology of things (that's my job) but they do present the information in very thorough fashion. It's good info too; I was interested to read about how the government encouraged rabbit breeding during WWI and WWII when food shortages hit the nation, and I was surprised to hear that it's still a busy cottage industry, largely filled with scam artists who try to convince people to buy some rabbits and food by telling them they can sell the kits for far more than anyone would actually pay. This leaves gullible people stuck with dozens of rabbits and no market for them.

Speaking of no market and rabbit overpopulation, the one thing in the book that did sadden me were the tales of rabbits after people buy cute little bunnies for Easter pets. The vast majority of them are mistreated out of ignorance by their new owners, and most die quickly, or are abandoned to die in the wild (Pet rabbits are domesticated, and can't forage for themselves in a park any more than your sweet, fat, lazy housecat or dog could survive competing against the vicious feral alleycats and mongrels they'd face if you dumped them in an alley downtown.), or are returned to pet stores and euthanized.  And those are the lucky ones; up to 50% of them die on the way to the pet stores or shortly after arriving there, since they are crowded into huge trucks and shipped cross country from the breeding locations, and they're always very young and fragile, since tiny cute ones are the ones people buy in their misguided Easter impulse pet shopping.

I didn't exit the book with very different feelings about rabbits than I had going in, but I did learn a lot, and could have learned a lot more if I hadn't skimmed all the sections that bored me. The info was presented clearly and thoroughly, and the sections about pet rabbits were fascinating. I definitely want to own some at some point, once we're in a house that's big enough to support it. I don't want to rabbit-proof my entire house (they gnaw every sort of electrical cord), but I would love having a few rescued bunnies in a little herd in a spare room or two, with outdoor access to a nicely-fenced off garden. That's basically how I kept my rats; in a community in a large cage, and I let them out to roam when I was there to supervise, but only in one room. As the book describes, it's quite fun to have a herd of small animals roaming around, and when they all come and romp on top of you and play with each other in entertaining fashion it's great to watch. I don't really miss my old rat pets, but I want to try a similar thing with ferrets or rabbits or something else small and furry at some point in my life.

Luckily for me, both the authors of the book are located in the Bay Area, and there are various other rabbit rescue centers around here, so I would have no trouble getting into it. Malaya didn't have time to read the book before it was due back at the library, but she has long loved rabbits, so I'm sure she'd be interested in taking in some for pets someday. Expect photos, when the time comes, but I doubt it will happen this decade, so don't get too anxious.