The Rabbit Outbreak: A highly contagious, often lethal animal virus arrives in the United States. By Susan Orlean "In the universe of human-animal relations, rabbits occupy a liminal space. They are the only creatures we regularly keep as pets in our homes that we also, just as regularly, eat or wear. Fitting into both the companion-animal category and the livestock category means that rabbits are not entirely claimed by either. A number of animal statutes—particularly, felony-cruelty provisions—are specific to dogs and cats, but not to rabbits. Laws protecting livestock, such as the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, don’t apply to rabbits, either, even rabbits being raised for meat, because the U.S.D.A. does not officially recognize them as livestock. There is probably no other animal that is viewed as diversely, and valued as differently, by its various partisans. Simply being a rabbit person doesn’t mean that you look at rabbits the same way as another self-identified rabbit person. Any of the almost twenty thousand members of the American Rabbit Breeders Association are just as likely to be raising a prized Jersey Wooly that sleeps in their bed and is primped for rabbit shows as they are to have hundreds of caged rabbits that will end up as stew." "Rabbits have an unusual history with viruses. The first virus ever deliberately used to eradicate a wild-animal population was myxoma virus, which causes myxomatosis, a disease fatal to domestic rabbits. It was deployed in 1950, in Australia, where a dozen or so domestic rabbits released on a hunting estate in 1859 had outperformed all mathematical modelling and become many hundreds of millions—the fastest-known spread of any mammal on earth. The rabbits wreaked ecological disaster as they ate their way across the country. Shooting them made only a temporary dent in their numbers. Myxoma virus was introduced in the hope of controlling the population; it soon killed an estimated five hundred million rabbits. (In parts of Australia, it is still illegal to have a pet rabbit.)"