IN THE 1986 film Jean de Florette, Gerard Depardieu plays an idealistic hunchback who leaves his city job to inherit a family farm in Provence, where he plans to raise rabbits in commercial quantities – unaware that his dastardly neighbours have plugged the only spring on the land and covered it over, thereby sealing his doom.
The rabbit project gets off to a good start. Then the grim reality of a scorching Provençal summer sets in. The bunnies die for want of water. The poor hunchback soon follows them. And finally his widow is force to sell up cheap, allowing the plotters to proceed with their rival plan for the land: to grow carnations.
Grim (but beautifully shot) as it was, the film does not necessarily hold a moral for would-be Irish rabbit farmers. Certainly, shortage of water would not be a problem here. Public eating tastes could be; although the recession may help overcome the modern-day distaste for rabbit meat. Beyond that, the species’ well-known powers of multiplication should solve most of the other problems separating Irish producers from profitability.
Which is why the latest news from Spain must all but clinch this as the next big thing in alternative agriculture. Never mind your common-or-garden bunny. In a development that recalls a more recent film Wallace and Gromit's The Curse of the Were-Rabbit— a breeding project in Valencia is seeking to revive the giant Valenciano species, now rare in Spain, except as a pet.
The Valenciano can grow to the size of an adolescent sheep, producing 15lbs of meat in the process. Nor does its size does come at the expense of one of the other characteristics for which rabbits are known. Which is one of the reasons why the breeders predict it will be in the food shops within three years.
The outsized breed was created in 1912 as a cross between the domestic Spanish and the imported Flemish giant. It soon became prolific in its own right, producing up to 16 offspring at a time. The rabbits were widely exported until the 1970s, by which time their popularity as food seems to have outstripped their multiplication.
Mind you, among the things any Irish rabbit farmers might have to consider before introducing the Valenciano here would be the risk of escape, which might leave their owners open to compensation claims from more conventional farmers.
Even ordinary-sized rabbits are voracious eaters. It’s reckoned that 40 of them can consume the same amount of grass as a cow, while a mere seven or eight will do the work of an average sheep. Good fences would be crucial to any business plan. Otherwise, herds of giant marauding rabbits could make the prime pastureland of Meath look like the Curragh in no time.
I DISCOVERED that cow-sheep-rabbit ratio in a story in The Irish Timesarchive from July 1950, headlined "Rabbit plague hits nation".
The middle of the last century marked both a high point in the Irish rabbit’s population and a low point in its popularity. The species was routinely referred in newspapers then as a “pest” and “vermin”. And it was under the cover of this public sanction that farmers deliberately and illegally introduced myxomatosis, of which the country has never been rid since.
The sheer unpleasantness of this virus added an extra layer of stigma to rabbit-eating, which seems already to have been in decline. This newspaper’s parliamentary report from 1917 has a House of Lords speaker lamenting the war-related rise in the price of rabbit and noting that “no form of food was more thoroughly appreciated by the poorer classes”.
Twenty years later, however, a headline was declaring war on rabbits, and speculating that the soaring lepine population reflected the public’s loss of enthusiasm for eating them. By 1954, the cookery correspondent was reporting: “There’s nothing wrong with rabbit” — a sure sign that in the eyes of many readers, there was.
There were occasional revivals in the rabbit’s popularity, albeit mainly export-led. During the second World War, a story headlined “New Use for Headlamps” reported farmers making £5 a night harvesting large quantities of rabbits for dispatch to food-rationed England.
“The latest method, being used all over the country, consists of a motor-car battery, or a series of small batteries, and a headlight. The hunters approach the field of operations noiselessly and take up positions between the burrows and the rabbits out grazing. When the light is flashed on, the rabbits come racing into the glare. . .” I will spare readers with pet rabbits the details of what happened next.
But I wonder if such activities explain the origins of the verb “to lamp” – meaning to hit somebody, especially on the head. The term is not confined to Ireland. But is still very popular here, especially in GAA circles, as in this example: “I swung my hurley at the ball, missed by four feet, and lamped the full back”.