So popular is it now that demand has started to outstrip supply and so suppliers and restaurant chains, running short of wild rabbits, are now buying farm-bred rabbits from the continent and particularly France. Rabbit is now said to be the fourth most popular farmed animal in the world. 

There’s nothing wrong with any of this since we all have to eat and the world’s population continues to grow. However, the pressure group Compassion in World Farming (CIWF) have recently investigated the methods of rabbit farming and the results of their investigation, like those a few years back into battery hen farming, are quite disturbing. 

They reveal that rabbits are forced to live in conditions so cramped and overcrowded that they barely have room to move and are sometimes unable to even sit down. One in five of the rabbits, or 20% if you prefer percentages, die in captivity and are simply thrown away as rubbish. This apparently doesn’t concern most suppliers, since as we all know rabbits are prolific breeders and in spite of the wastage the farmers are still going to get a good return on their investment.

The CIWF are doing their best to expose this practice and it is to be hoped that something can be done about it and that the welfare of these poor creatures is put above mere profit. In this country, unlike many others, we do have reasonably humane laws on the raising and killing of animals for meat. Those laws are not always adhered to but that is a question of policing and government funding. I am a meat eater and I am not ashamed of that but I think it should shame us all that animals bred simply to be killed for our consumption spend the whole of their short lives in constant suffering.