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Comment by 0daystock | Hacker News Reader

The problem originates with people releasing domesticated rabbits into the wild when they decide they no longer wish to care for them as pets. Unfortunately, this is almost always a death sentence for the creature which won't understand how to survive in the wild, lacks camouflage and will likely get picked off by a predator within several days. If you've ever taken a walk through Discovery Park near Seattle, you'll see a similar spectacle. Please, if you ever think about doing this, stop and bring the animal to a shelter, or try to re-home them yourself instead.

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That seems like a very locale specific explanation. In Boston, rabbits are prolific, even with a very robust predator population. Our local rabbits also appear to have pretty good instincts and decent woodsy camouflage, not your bright white pet bunnies.

Any animal raised and cared for closely by humans is going to be unprepared for that. It’s cruel.

My point was that the majority of rabbits around me appear to be born wild, not released or escaped. In spite of the numerous coyotes, hawks, etc, you'll find plenty of them, year after year, like squirrels or chipmunks.

0daystock was making an absolute statement as if dozens of people in my neighborhood are releasing rabbits every year. That may be the case in some areas but I doubt it holds here.

Eh, cats usually adapt pretty well when transitioning from house cat -> stray cat, but they're probably an outlier as they're predators themselves.

That’s because a house cat is just a stray cat that’s decided to let you feed it for a while.

it's locale specific, but it's like, locale specific to places that do the bunny stuff for easter, which is like a material proportion of the earth

Unlike in the US, European wild rabbits and domestic rabbits are actually the same species, so it's hard to tell if these rabbits are naturally wild, or were released.

I don't understand the problem with this. Life is a death sentence; you are just allowing them to realize their destiny, and helping a hungry hawk. Isn't nature wonderfu?

Let me try and put it in a way hackers might understand: you're putting a buggy and out-of-date program with lots of exposed network ports and PII on the Internet with no firewall. We're all adults and can come to our own conclusions about the morality of this decision, but I think we can all agree deploying un-optimized code to prod is in poor taste.

I've seen a lot of bad analogies on HN. This is the worst.

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