Your rabbit is one of the newest pets in the house

The dog has been with us for tens of thousands of years. The cat for thousands. Your rabbit? A relative newcomer.

Wild European rabbits come from Iberia and southern France. The Romans kept them in walled enclosures called leporaria — not as pets, but as a larder that fed itself. Later, medieval monasteries and estates ran managed warrens for meat and fur. Rabbits were livestock long before they were companions.

The pet rabbit as we know it is largely a Victorian invention. That's when breeders began selecting seriously for coat, colour, ear and size, and the rabbit fancy took off. Most of the breeds you can name today are younger than the railway.

Why it matters on a Tuesday afternoon: a short domestication means a short distance from the wild. Your rabbit still wants to dig, still wants a tunnel with two exits, still freezes rather than complains, still lives better with another rabbit than alone. None of that is fussiness. It's a prey animal running software that was written in a Spanish hillside.

Give them somewhere to burrow into, somewhere to hide, and company. You're not spoiling a pet — you're meeting a wild spec sheet. 🐇