Creationist Rabbiting

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Courier Column, June 28th under headline

Rabbit rabbit rabbit rabbit rabbit rabbit....

Please don’t mistake me for a Creationist.  I am not.  But I think I have uncovered a flaw in the theory of evolution.  And it should be obvious to any country dweller or visitor, and certainly to any dog owner.

The only surprise is that Mr Darwin, himself a resident of relatively rural Kent, didn’t factor it in to his calculations.

Another curiosity is that Myrtle studiously ignores the creatures in question when sniffing around on a walk.  Pheasants she startles and follows in hopeless pursuit.  Squirrels she chases until they disappear up a tree.  Foxes she eyeballs and runs after in a desultory sort of way as if she knows they are too canny to catch.

But she appears entirely myopic to the multitude of rabbits we encounter every day. It doesn’t seem right. I mean aren’t dogs are supposed to chase rabbits?  My friend’s Jack Russell will vanish after the merest scent of a bunny.  Indeed he once got himself wedged in a warren entrance, looking for all the world like Winnie-the-Pooh in EH Shephard’s illustration of a similar predicament.

The point is, though, that Myrtle cannot possibly miss the rabbits that scatter before her because of their extraordinarily conspicuous tails.  Disturb a down of rabbits basking in the sun and it’s not their brownish bodies you notice, it’s their white scuts (alright, I didn’t know that was the correct word for a bobtail until I looked it up either) scuttling away.

But why?  What possible advantage can there be to having a rear end that shouts “come and get me”?  You’d have thought  - well, I’d have thought - that over a few millennia the rabbits without beacon-bums would have been better survivors and the species would slowly have lost this unhelpful characteristic through evolution.

But not a bit of it.  Every year new generations of white-tailed kittens appear (yes, that is the correct term for their young) to flaunt themselves before men-with-guns and other predators like foxes, cats, mink, stoats, polecats, badgers, weasels, buzzards, hawks and owls - though not my dog.

Sadly for my thesis, in-depth research on oryctolagus cuniculus - the European wild rabbit - elicited that the disappearing white tail that so attracts attention is the very same thing which actually alerts other rabbits to that danger.  It’s funny, this evolution thing.