UFO Info Week-End

Wild rabbit is also free- range and organic perfect for the health-conscious consumer

Wild rabbit is also free- range and organic; perfect for the health-conscious consumer.And the taste is something else. Simon Hopkinson of Bibendum, the London restaurant, and also the Independent’s food writer, says it has “hugely more flavour than ordinary rabbit. When we do eat rabbit, we want it shrink-wrapped, skinned, deboned and in chunks The rest of Europe is less squeamish. In France they eat 7 million rabbits a week, one rabbit for every five people.

Italians eat 9lb of rabbit each every year, compared with 30oz each here. Myxomatosis is now confined to a few pockets in Britain, but the stigma remains.And, then there is the Watership Down factor. Man’s inhumanity to rabbit in Richard Adams’ bestselling novel, coupled with generations of British children reared on Beatrix Potter, means that eating a cousin of the floppy-eared pet in a hutch at the bottom of the garden is thought in seriously bad taste.Such sentimentality does not exist on the Continent. Although harmless to humans, suddenly few people could bear eating even healthy animals.

The disease made human disasters such as the Black Death (33 per cent mortality) look mild; the death rate is 199 in 200. Myxomatosis also looks particularly unpleasant: it causes the rabbit’s eyes to swell up and seal with pus All over the country people saw blind, dying rabbits. Our grandparents were raised on rabbit pie, but in the Second World War it was often the only meat available, and familiarity bred disgust. Along with Spam, it became synonymous with rationing and hardship. Gerry Rofe, a retired rabbit farmer, quotes her mother on the end of rationing:Rabbit hot and rabbit cold,Rabbit young and rabbit old,Rabbit tender and rabbit tough,Thank the Lord we’ve had enough.Rabbit meat might have limped along as the poor man’s chicken were it not for myxomatosis, the virus introduced to cure a rabbit plague in 1954. “Commercial intensive rabbit farms are already a target of extremists,” he says. “In theory, ranching is like free-range versus battery, but it’s difficult to predict how activists might react: rabbits are an emotive subject.”And thereby hangs the tale The budding rabbit-meat vendor has a big problem The British will barely touch the stuff.

Mr Lymbery is initially welcoming of the wild ranching scheme: “We’d have to see the details – how they were killed and so on – but in principle it’s a great improvement on battery units.”The author of the report – who wants to remain anonymous – is more cautious about his proposal’s reception. At nine weeks they are slaughtered.Philip Lymbery, campaigns director for Compassion in World Farming, is a bitter opponent of “battery” rabbit farms He says their number is increasing alarmingly. The conditions in which the rabbits are kept are comparable to those of battery chickens. The kits are separated from their mothers at three weeks and put in wire cages Each kit is allowed only six square inches of space. Britain already has 1,000 intensive commercial rabbit farms, producing 3,750 tons of meat a year which is mainly sold abroad. By 1950, the industry was worth pounds 2bn in modern terms.Modern-day rabbit ranching could also find favour with the animal rights lobby.

As recently as 70 years ago, these were operating on a huge scale and some covered thousands of acres – for example, 128,856 animals were harvested at Lakenheath, Suffolk, in 1920-21 alone. The Normans introduced rabbits from the Mediterranean in the 12th century, and ranching peaked during the 19th century. “Warren” originally meant a walled enclosure where rabbits were farmed for meat, skins and fur. There are no sharp hooves to disturb the soil, and their nibbling prevents delicate plants from being swamped by long grass. The advantages of rabbits have long been recognised on chalk downland where their disappearance in the Fifties led to the extinction of the Large Blue butterfly.The Scottish Office is not the first to think of rabbit ranching. The rabbits would provide cash-strapped farmers with good profits at a minimal investment.