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Comment by mingusrude | Hacker News Reader

My sister has a small farm and in addition to cows and horses she also has rabbits. Every spring, parents show up to buy a rabbit to have at home. When the deal is done my sister takes the parents aside and tell them that if they plan or feel by the end of the summer that they want to let the rabbit loose, they can return it for free.

What she does not tell is that our brother-in-law is a chef and happily makes rabbit stew of the returned rabbits. If there was ever a win-win situation, this is it.

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> If there was ever a win-win situation, this is it.

Say what? She lies via omission to the parents, forcing them to make an uninformed choice.

Instead of letting a rabbit loose in the wild, they might have sought another home for it, because they didn't want it to die. Your sister's lies mislead them into thinking they can safely return the rabbit.

Letting them free will likely get them eaten anyway, probably less humanly since they’ll still be alive while they are eaten. Or run over. These are domesticated rabbits, not wild ones.

What the parent post means is that the owners might not have let the rabbit free bit would find an other alternative, like keeping the rabbit anyway because they love it, giving the rabbit to a friend etc. But now they think their is this great alternative of giving the rabbit back but unknowingly killing it.

I’ve had several friends have rabbits in my lifetime. They all t eventually let them go instead of finding a new home. Each time I looked at them in horror while I imagined the lucky hawk having dinner.

Most people think rabbits are “natural” when they may actually be invasive. So they let them go. Finding a new home is the last thing on every one of these owners mind.

I could never imagine doing this to an animal I care about. This is sociopathic behaviour. Unless they believe the rabbit will survive, in which it's just wildly ignorant. And therefore irresponsible, because a rabbit owner should have a rough understanding of what a rabbit is and how they work.

It is quite sad and irresponsible, but extremely common.

There was a case here in Norway a few years back. A litter of dead kittens was found in the woods, wrapped in several layers of plastic bags. Inner layers had scratches proving the kittens were alive and not stillborn.

Hongkong has a _modest_ social problem related to freeing unwanted pets into the wild. There are numerous billboards and buses adverts warning people not to do it.

On the other hand, there is very real urban legend of a salt water crocodile that was captured in early 2000s in the Hongkong wild. It was hunted for months. Authorities have no idea if was a release, or travelled from nearby (more tropical) region. Read more about Pui Pui on Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pui_Pui_(crocodile) She is even on show at the Hongkong Wetland Park. But if you want to see salties in the wild without too much effort or stress, you can do that in Singapore at a wetland reserve near Kranji.

These are two contradictory reasons. Rabbits are considered invasive because there is a non-zero chance they will escape the hawk and reproduce.

It's not contradictory in the slightest, the odds of a domesticated and domestic rabbit surviving predation are effectively nil.

The odds that it manages a litter first are higher, especially if it escapes pregnant, which rabbits generally are if they're able to be. Those pups are feral, not domestic, and have moderately better odds. Given enough generations, the domesticated neoteny is selected out by predation and now you have an invasive population of feral rabbits which can survive in the wild.

Everyone dies eventually.

Yes, but not of predation. The number of rabbits which die of age or starvation in their burrows over the winter, or disease, is not zero.

Would you rather be released from prison into a dangerous world or executed?

These are not wild rabbits.

You cannot release them into the wild, just like you can’t release penguins from the zoo into the wild. We spend most of our adult life teaching our children how to survive. Most people don’t teach their pets how to survive.

No offense, but your question makes no sense in the scope we are dealing with. But fwiw, most people released from prison don’t do so well with reintegration. Some don’t survive, some end up going back, and very few thrive.

People aren’t domesticated rabbits.

My experience is that you don't let a rabbit go... you just stop trying to track the little lagomorph down after it chews through or digs under the fence for the third time.

Rabbits are good as prey, great as pests, bad as pets.

Rabbits are incredibly destructive of many environments. Have a look at New Zealand.

Then don't breed them, sell them as pets, then lie to parents and kill and eat them. Seems like an easy solution..

This is how I’ve always behaved, yet the problem remains.

There is no lie, only assumptions on their part.

The whole thing was an Invisible initiation, there was never any rabbit.

They can, in fact, safely return the rabbit to the stew pot.

They're food. Rabbits. People eat them.

It's not better for the rabbit to be turned loose to be mauled to death by a housecat or eaten by a coyote. A shelter is going to euthanize, wasting good meat.

This is squeamishness masquerading as morality.

That's not the point. I have literally nothing against eating rabbits - they are delicious in fact.

I do hover, object to lying. Like OP said - they(everyone in fact) have the right to make an informed choice. By omitting this information, people who are returning a rabbit aren't making an informed choice. It's a trick, a ruse, if money was involved I'd call it a fraud.

Nothing to do with squeamishness.

They're returning the rabbits to the previous owners. There's no further expectation of duty to either party.

The situation implies that the person selling the rabbits as pets would attempt to rehome them or care for them as pets.

There's a difference between being technically correct, and being moral. While the language used is technically correct for the situation, omitting the information about where the rabbits end up is immoral.

Clearly OP understands that if the whole truth was told, they wouldn't be getting a free source of rabbit meat...

Is it dishonest to buy a rabbit and not mention that you're planning to eat/breed/keep it as a pet?

No of course not, it's none of the seller's business. If they say "hey we're vegan please don't eat our rabbits" that's a different matter, it would be at the very least polite to respect those wishes.

Why on Earth would returning a rabbit to a farm where they eat them be any different? In this case the possibility is perfectly clear.

I think the bit about it being a "farm where they eat them" is the key point.

If the person returning it knows that, then sure. The OP implied pretty heavily that they don't know the ultimate fate of the rabbits.

As far as these people know its "A farm where they sell breed and sell rabbits as pets", not a farm that raises them for meat.

"it's none of the seller's business"

In this case, the parties are close relatives, so I would argue that their threshold of duty to disclose such facts is somewhat higher than in case of complete strangers.

I would hardly call it immoral. If the owners are curious about the ultimate fate of the rabbit, they could simply ask before returning.

I think it doesn't occur to them that the rabbit's new home is in the oven. They wouldn't think about asking

I think the expectation is that since they bought the rabbit there and the rabbit was happily living there, when they return it, they expect it to still live. They think they are returning the rabbit to its "natural" environment and will happily live on the farm.

So there is no legal duty or obligation, but morally, the expectation on both parties are definitely not the same. Otherwise they would tell them that they would cook them when they return them. The fact they are hiding this information shows that expectations are not aligned.

Yeah but it's a farm... it's not a rabbit rescue and pet store

Did you miss the part where the sister says "that [if] they want to let the rabbit loose, they can return it for free"?

That's an outright lie, since they aren't letting the rabbit loose to live on the farm -- they're eating it.

what matters is not what we think. What matters is what the girl recovering the rabbits thinks. If she thinks that if she told the truth the rabbits wouldn't be returned to her, then by not saying anything, she is lying by omission.

Are dogs food?

Are pigs food to Muslims?

Is there a culture where eating rabbit is taboo?

You said

> They're food. Rabbits. People eat them.

Well people eat dogs and pigs so then by the same logic they are food.

I've had dogs as pets for decades. I don't see why people cant eat them if they want to. I wouldn't eat my dog because of emotional attachments, but that doesn't mean that others who don't have emotional ties cant eat them.

But perhaps you can see why someone would be upset if you needed to pass your dog to someone else's care; and they ate them.

I was in Northern Vietnam in 2019, happily riding my rental scooter around.

I ride right past a dog on a rotisserie.

I stopped to talk to the guy and he showed me his sign that said Dog Meat. After learning the words for dog meat in Vietnamese, I saw the signs everywhere.

What is with all your edgelord stuff with rabbits. You need to work out some of your issues

The part which seems relevant is if the parents (or a random person) had the information that the rabbit would be made into stew, then that would likely change their decision to return the rabbit.

Australia would like to have a word with you.

Doesn't this produce a selection effect against cute rabbits? Parents are more likely to choose cute rabbits, those rabbits become pets, they either get returned and eaten or kept. So non-cute rabbits tend to live longer on the farm, and as such have more offspring and get selected for, and eventually the farm will be covered in ugly rabbits and your sister will not have any clients anymore.

Ugly rabbits probably get the stew treatment first

What kind of people adopt a pet, and then release it into the wild? People doing this with cats is one of the reasons stray cats are such a big problem in many places. People dumping cat litters in the woods and what not. And rabbits can be an ecological menace too if allowed to multiply, which they do like rabbits.

> What kind of people adopt a pet, and then release it into the wild?

Have you seen how much litter people throw on the ground? I think you might be giving the average person too much credit.

I'm not talking about cat litter I'm talking about litters of kittens. Who gives a fuck about litter?

Unless you're talking about litter as in garbage.

But if you think dumping helpless animals under your care to fend for themselves is morally equivalent to littering, I'm not even sure what to say to that. It's not even in the same ballpark.

I know commenting on downvotes isn't kosher but I really wish downvoters would leave a comment on why. It could be 3 words: downvoted for x.

I'm really not sure what is so objectionable about asserting that animal abuse is not the same thing as littering.

I think that animal abuse is not the same thing as littering but that the type of people who litter are also the same type on irresponsible people who will think that leaving a rabbit to fend for themselves is no big deal. Either they are clueless and think that rabbits can fend for themselves or they do not care about the consequences of their actions as proven by littering.

Sure. But there is something very different about the animal case because most normal people make emotional connections with their pets.

I own a Norwegian forest cat he was a stray and then found and neutered as an adult. I pretty much know that he could survive just fine on his own by hunting rodents, which he sometimes does anyway. But I still wouldn't leave him to fend for himself because I know he's much happier as a pet and I also just don't want him to leave. That's the part I don't really get. And I'm not some bleeding heart animals should have human rights type person either. Even though squirrels are cute, I'm not shedding tears while cleaning one up that the cat brought in. It's a wild animal that got killed by a predator. That's just nature.

I don't understand the emotional calculus of doing thing to an animal you've lived with and taken care of for months. And I really don't think that is normal at all.

Since you asked nicely: downvoted for using a specific type of language.

It’s the first part in the HN guidelines for comments:

“Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.”

Thank you. Yeah, I kind of misunderstood GGP as a deliberate misinterpretation of my usage of the countable noun "litter". And it ticked me off. Having grown up on 4chan and IRC, I'm often a bit surprised by what's considered snark on HN vs other parts of the internet. I'll try to adjust my weights in future.

I'm really glad people don't leave comments for downvoting. Then this forum would be littered (heh) with completely useless 3-word comments "downvoted for x".

Be less concerned with your internet points.

It's not that I'm so conserned with my points really. Just sometimes it sucks if people disapprove of what you said and you're not sure why. It's usually enough if just one person leaves a comment. Sometimes these things are just hard for me to interpret and it frustrates me a bit.

> if people disapprove of what you said and you're not sure why

Good point, I've been mildly about about that me too in some cases (I'm sbd else)

I'm fairly confident that they meant garbage, yes.

Without commenting on the amount of badness, the point is that they're both bad things that people nonetheless manage to regularly do.

A large number of invasive species in many countries are pets that were released in the wild. Snakes and gold fish are probably the most well known among them. Most humans are selfish I think people doing the right thing in private is a lot less common than people assume hence when someone does something unselfish it is celebrated.

Fish and turtles immediately come to mind. I knew of somebody who released Siberian dwarf hamsters and for a brief period they multiplied in their backyard before the local red tailed hawk caught wind

This!

where i live there are wild rabbits and in previous years the population has literally exploded.

The Rabbits are smart, they build a den under my deck knowing the dog cant reach them and the dog keeps other predators away.

Then a red tailed fox moved into the area... and now instead of finding whole rabbits roaming the neighbourhood, you find the odd rabbit component. Maybe a rear quarter here, or a front limb there.

Goldfish, turtles, snakes, lizards, rabbits, etc are all animals people bought for pets and then decided that they didn't want them and released them into the "wild" to be "free" without considering the consequences for the animal or the environment.

>What kind of people adopt a pet, and then release it into the wild?

I have a friend who just acquired a ball python because the frat house behind her left the snake tank, with the snake inside it, out with the trash can. Many people have no regard for animals and even less regard for their impact on the world around them.

This is not goat content.

Yeah, sounds like a win-win situation alright - the pet rabbit gets slaughtered, the children and parents are lied to. Your sister sounds like a great person.

Agreed, that seems rather questionable.

It's seriously skeezy. One of those comments that makes me have less faith in humanity.

Hmm, that does not sound right.

Your sister is a bad person

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