People Have Believed a Lie About Rabbit Domestication for Decades
Scientists don’t know when bunnies became docile—and they're not even sure if that's an answerable question.
It is often said, in both popular articles and scientific papers, that rabbits were first domesticated by French monks in 600 AD.
Back then, Pope Gregory the Great had allegedly decreed that laurices—newborn or fetal rabbits—didn’t count as meat. Christians could therefore eat them during Lent. They became a popular delicacy, and hungry monks started breeding them. Their work transformed the wild, skittish European rabbit into a tame domestic animal that tolerates humans.
This was the story that Greger Larson from the University of Oxford heard when he first started studying domestic rabbits. Almost on a whim, he told his student Evan Irving-Pease to find a reference from the Vatican
