Bunny tales

If unappealing to artists (who, beginning with Dürer, prefer the hare), the rabbit has been a stalwart of children’s stories, from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to Watership Down, The Tale of Peter Rabbit and The Velveteen Rabbit. It’s the body. A rabbit is soft, rounded, compact—that button tail—and vulnerable, almost innocent, thus it tugs the same human heart strings as an infant child. Ducks do the same, whereas the long-necked, hissing swan does not. But, being nocturnal and capable of zig-zagging when pursued, the rabbit carries a little mystery and deceit about its being.

Fictitious rabbits are rarely entirely insipid. On the contrary, Bugs, Brer Rabbit and Peter are literary hopes that the weak, but ingenious can overcome the powerful, but dim.

The human ambivalence towards bunny is caught perfectly in superstitions. A rabbit’s foot is lucky (since 600BC), but an actual rabbit on board a ship is unlucky. To this day, Brittany Ferries refuses to carry them. Tales and beliefs about rabbits are far from being exclusively Western. Chinese, Japanese and Korean folklore include tales of the Moon Rabbit, as does Buddhist tradition. In Native American mythology, Nanabozho is a deity and life-giver, which assumes the form of a rabbit.