My sister has a one-year-old cat that has bags of energy and is a very enthusiastic hunter. The other day, she heard a great commotion outside the house and found the cat pursuing a very young wild rabbit.
The cat was almost upon the rabbit when she arrived on scene and she expected the chase to be over without any hope of being curtailed, but the rabbit then turned and ran straight toward her, and lay down on the ground - literally right in front of her feet - and it allowed her to pick it up without struggling or trying to escape.
The animal was physically unhurt and she released it back into the field at the end of her road, where it had probably come from. It was apparently a completely healthy specimen.
Does this behaviour make any sense in general, or is it exceptional? Are rabbits known to take refuge by a larger animal when being hotly pursued by a smallish predator?
I don’t think it was trying to take refuge by your sister so much as panicked by the cat to the point that it couldn’t come up with a logical escape plan.
Rabbits, at least those I’ve owned, seem to not realize that running straight at the thing (often their human) they’re trying to get away from is a poor strategy: most of the time I’ve chased them down to put them back in the cage, they’ve eventually run right at me, possibly hoping to dart around me but generally hopping head-first into my shins.
That’s been basically my experience too, except I rarely chase them. I can just stand there and eventually they’ll run right into my legs. Rabbits strike me as amazingly dumb at times, and it’s hard to reason out what they could possibly have been thinking.
Probably total ignorance about rabbits, but wasn’t she afraid of getting bit? I had a similar experience with a chipmunk once. Rescued it from the cat, it went limp. I picked it up and walked it to the woods looking it over for injuries when it went from limp to attack.
I managed to shake it loose but man did my finger bleed as it ran off. I think if chipmunks are any indication maybe it was hoping for your sister to drop her guard.
Yes. There’s no doubt about this detail - her house is twenty yards from open fields where there is a large population of wild rabbits - and in any case, this animal was too young to be properly tame in any case, even if it had been domestic in origin.
Yes - that’s one of the striking aspects of the encounter - she was expecting it to struggle and scratch, but it remained completely docile and compliant once it got to her, and away from the cat.
That’s interesting because even my pet rabbits, hand-raised by me since 10 weeks old and heavily socialized to humans, still dislike being picked up and held above the ground. They usually limit their displeasure to lowering their ears and widening their eyes, but will occasionally squirm and start looking for a way down if they think they’re being held up too long.
The only thing I can think of is that the rabbit was just so terrified by the cat that being held by this not-immediately-threatening figure was preferable, and the rabbit also no longer saw the cat, which was somewhat calming in comparison.
The problem is that it seems a bit much to attribute this to a chain of reasoning relating to possible outcomes - it would make sense if it was something along the lines of rabbits exploiting safety in proximity to large herbivores such as horses and cows (which I think foxes and cats will generally steer clear of).
Maybe, but unless your sister is vegetarian, doesn’t digesting meat produce a smell animals can detect?
If not your sister still has forward facing predator eyes, though I suppose she wouldn’t look like any predator the rabbit evolved to deal with in other ways. Her long legs could look like horse and cow legs to the rabbit.
Not so much here in the UK, there isn’t - our wild rabbits are the same species from which most domestic breeds originated (not that centuries of domestication couldn’t have made a difference to temperament, however)
To an extent, I expect so, but it seems unlikely to have been a factor in this case. I expect the effect is greater in animals that don’t bathe daily.
That’s basically what I’m wondering, although it may just be that the rabbit was panicked into a state beyond all normal behaviour, and therefore did something that just doesn’t make sense.
Thinking on it I’ve seen birds and rodents play dead, waiting for an escape. Once I caught a blue jay. I don’t know how. It was setting on the fence and I walked over and picked it up. It had a heart beat so it was alive. I talked quietly to it about how it shouldn’t let mammals grab it like that because sometimes they’re cats and all of sudden it exploded to life and flew away as if it now comprehended how dangerous mammals are. Strangest experience ever.
I think what happened was I unintentionally snuck up on it, and it from their it was too scared to do anything. Talking to it gently calmed it down enough to escape.
Anyway goodling this hunch lead to:
Which further googling says rodents, including rabbits exhibit.
I once saw someone reach down and pick up a pigeon that was sharing a picnic table with him. I don’t know which was more surprised, the bird or the man.
I don’t know that I’d trust a google site that believes rabbits are rodents.
Well that was my own ignorance, which was just fought. There are separate reports of tonic immobility for rabbits and rodents among others. Until a few minutes ago I thought rabbits were a kind rodent because their bodies are so similar. ignorance fought thanks.
They used to be considered rodents on the basis of morphological similarities - and although they were reclassified quite a long time ago, the notion remained in common parlance for a very long time - for example, some Bugs Bunny cartoons refer to him as a rodent.
Not sure I understand – that link says wild rabbits are hares, but the Wikipedia page on hares says they differ from cottontail rabbits. Around here (US, mid-Atlantic region) we have wild animals called cottontail rabbits. Unless we’re misusing the term and calling them cottontails when they’re not, they aren’t hares.
So is that claim wrong? Or am I just splitting hares?
