Dumb Swedes and their Daily New Deaths from Covid.

This past February, a pet rabbit being boarded overnight at Manhattan’s Center for Avian and Exotic Medicine, the busiest rabbit veterinary practice in New York City, died. The fact that the rabbit had seemed fine and then expired without warning was chalked up to the rabbit habit of feigning good health. Later that evening, another rabbit at the clinic died. The coincidence of the additional death was strange, especially because the first rabbit that died was elderly, and the second was young. A third rabbit that died the same night was middle-aged; even though she was known to have had an abdominal mass that compromised her well-being, there had been no reason to think she was about to perish. Two deaths might have been a fluke; three seemed ominous.

The clinic’s staff wanted to get the remaining fifteen or twenty rabbits out of the building immediately, but many of the owners were away and unable to retrieve them on short notice. This group happened to include Dr. Alix Wilson, the clinic’s medical director, who was on vacation and whose own rabbits, Captain Larry and Dolly, were boarding there. In the meantime, the staff threw out all the clinic’s rabbit food and bedding, in case something in them had poisoned the three rabbits. Within several weeks, eight more rabbits that had been at the clinic in February succumbed. Captain Larry was thriving, but Dolly, a medium-sized Lop that Wilson had just adopted to keep Larry company, died.

One of the lagoviruses of the family Caliciviridae causes a highly contagious illness called rabbit hemorrhagic disease. RHD is vexingly hard to diagnose. An infected rabbit might experience vague lethargy, or a high fever and difficulty breathing, or it might exhibit no symptoms at all. Regardless of the symptoms, though, the mortality rate for RHD can reach a gloomy hundred per cent. There is no treatment for it. The virus’s ability to survive and spread is uncanny. It can persist on dry cloth with no host for more than a hundred days; it can withstand freezing and thawing; it can thrive in a dead rabbit for months, and on rabbit pelts, and in the wool made from Angora-rabbit fur, and in the rare rabbit that gets infected but survives. It can travel on birds’ claws and flies’ feet and coyotes’ fur. Its spread has been so merciless and so devastating that some pet owners have begun referring to it as “rabbit Ebola.”...

Myxomatosis did travel to the United States, but for some reason it never got much of a foothold here. Had it established itself, it would have been disastrous, because at that time, in the middle of the last century, rabbits were a significant food source. Most people associate rabbit meat with European diets, but it was once a staple in this country. There were many huge commercial rabbit farms in the United States, and rabbit meat was readily available in supermarkets. The biggest processor was (and still is) Pel-Freez, founded in 1911 by a man who was given a pet rabbit that was pregnant, and, according to Pel-Freez’s corporate history, turned “the dilemma into an opportunity.” Rabbit meat, which could be cooked like chicken, was appealingly high in protein and low in fat. Back then, it was also much cheaper than beef. And raising rabbits is easy. A rabbit can give birth every thirty days; a young rabbit reaches what is known as “fryer age” in just sixty days. But, even during their heyday as a market product, rabbits weren’t treated like other livestock. Because the U.S.D.A. doesn’t classify them as such, it has never required rabbit meat to be inspected or graded....Most countries affected by the virus began offering the vaccine, and within a few years the spread appeared to have been tamped down. But, in 2010, rabbits in France began dying of what turned out to be a mutated version of the virus. The vaccine for the original virus was ineffective against the new strain; this was RHDV2. Soon, it was rampant throughout Europe and Australia. In England, the spread was so vigorous that parents were advised not to let their children bury their dead rabbits in the garden, because, “while comforting to children,” the practice “may help circulate rabbit virus.” The mortality rate of the new variant appeared to be slightly lower than that of the original, and at first this seemed like good news. But, in fact, RHDV2 was even more efficient at spreading, in the sense that more infected rabbits were surviving, and, because they might not show symptoms, they weren’t being isolated, and passed along the disease. Vaccines guarding against RHDV2 were developed. (In some cases, they were produced in combination with the vaccine that prevents RHDV1.) By 2016, they were available across Europe, and vaccinating rabbits became common.

In the past three months, RHDV2 has shown up in seven Western states. Now that it has jumped to wild rabbits, most veterinarians I’ve spoken to believe that it’s here to stay, and that the U.S.D.A. should change its designation from a foreign animal disease to one that’s endemic. There have been a few lucky breaks. For instance, the big rabbit shows scheduled for the spring, which would have brought together tens of thousands of rabbits—a recipe for contagion—were cancelled because of COVID-19. Nevertheless, RHDV2 is advancing unabated....

As RHDV2 is poised to become endemic in the United States, the vaccine, which is the one thing that might stop it, is now caught up in the contradictions of rabbits. When I first spoke to Reeves, she had mentioned that rabbits are the most discriminated against of all domestic animals: ridiculed for their lustiness; viewed as expendable; lumped in with oddball animals like chinchillas and prairie dogs; always subject to the question of whether they’re pets or meat. She rued that the vaccine was just one more example of the peculiarity of their place in the world. Would dog owners be expected to use a medicine that was produced by killing a dog? Once again, rabbits seem to be betwixt and between. As Ralph Zimmerman put it, “Rabbits are just a real conundrum.”