It's a bunny old world

Once upon a time there was a little bunny rabbit called Arthur who lived in a snug little cage in a pet shop in Battersea, south London. One day, a little girl called Tiffany passed by the shop with her family, saw Arthur and fell for his dear little twitchy nose and adorable whiskers. She implored her parents to buy him as a pet, for her to love and cherish for ever. Her father gave the shop owner £30 and asked about the price of a hutch. "This 4ft x 4ft starter hutch is £20," said the shop-owner, "although it might be a bit small for..." "I'll take it," said Tiffany's father, silently considering it a bloody liberty he should drop 50 smackers, just to keep the kid quiet.

Back home, Tiffany petted Arthur all afternoon. She stroked his fur all next day. She fed him lettuce leaves and bits of carrot and gave him water to drink in a little cup. His ears were so soft! His nose was so pink! She liked to pick him up and hug him tight, although he struggled and tried to get away. She dreamt about him at night, and rushed to see him every morning. In the second week, she took him out of his hutch and let him sit on the grass. But she was disappointed to find he wouldn't chase a stick, like her dog, or roll about with a ball, like her cat, or play with her or growl at her or lick her or enjoy being stroked by her or come for walks with her or jump up at her command or show he noticed her or cared a hoot whether she was there or not, stupid rabbit, or do anything at all except just sit there all day, twitching and looking at her, but now like an animal scenting danger, his hunched body looked scared rather than snuggly.

Next day, she found something more interesting to play with and her mother bawled her out for forgetting to feed Arthur. Neither of them came near Arthur for days. He sat in his tiny hutch, that was no longer snug, unable to reach the last bit of dried lettuce that lay under his feet, wondering why his friend had gone off him. Then it was morning, Tiffany's father was unlocking the hutch and picking him up, quite painfully, by the ears and putting him into a very dark refuse sack and Arthur could feel himself being flung into a corrugated metal container, and the lid clanging down on top of it...

Among the British nation's sentimental obsessions about the animal kingdom, its attitude to rabbits is perhaps the most ambivalent. We love to see them lolloping across the meadows, their powder-puff tails going up and down, their toothy concentration when eating, their flight. We think of them as perfect pets for children because they're so sweet-natured and unthreatening. We romanticise their centuries-long battle against the farmer and his gun. Yet we've always been equally ready, historically speaking, to regard them as pests to be destroyed, as worthless food fit only for paupers, as irresponsible breeding-machines – and now, in 2003, they've become, in the United Kingdom, the pathetic asylum seekers of the pet world.

In the back garden of her house in Watford, Sally Machell is knee-deep in refugee rabbits. Ms Machell is a veterinary nurse and rabbit husbandry expert, and her third-of-an-acre of refugee ground – an elaborate sanctuary of hutches and wire-fenced runs – is at breaking-point. "I've got 200 rabbits at the moment looking for homes," she says, "and a waiting list of 150 more." She finds it hard to turn down any destitute Flopsy that's suffering or in imminent danger of homelessness. "Yesterday, I took in a rabbit from a man who's going to Australia and obviously can't take it with him. Today, I had a classic case of mis-sexing: a family had bought what they thought were two does [female rabbits], but weren't. They've now got a litter of five, and the doe is expecting again because does can become pregnant 24 hours after giving birth, so I've taken in the litter. Next week, I've got nine coming from the RSPCA, that were found on a balcony in terribly cramped conditions." Machell hopes to send all her refugee population to responsible homes, in pairs, once she's had them neutered and made sure they've bonded. Her one-woman operation is, simultaneously, a Dr Barnardo's shelter, a pet clinic, a rehousing facility and a lonely-hearts advisory bureau.

The neighbours have started to complain about the funny bunny-woman in their midst. Now the municipal fury of the Three Rivers District Council has been flung against her. "They're desperate to get me on something," she says. "They say I need planning permission for the extra hutches in the grounds. They've sent me forms asking if I've got sanitation and running water on the premises – I mean, these are rabbits." Now the council has discovered that she makes a modest income from boarding rabbits for people going on holiday, and is insisting she cannot run a "business" from her home. With admirable spirit, she's started a website campaign (savesallysbunnies.com) and has garnered support from 2,500 petitioners all over the world. "I will not be closed down," she says, with frontierswoman determination. "I have the resources, the facilities and the finance. This refuge and these rabbits have my total commitment."

Once upon a time, we were all just as fond of rabbits as Ms Machell. Long before Beatrix Potter began telling the tales of Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny, the long-eared Oryctolagus cuniculus was considered a very special mammal. In the mythologies of several races, rabbits were often linked with the moon because of their crepuscular playtime and nocturnal habits. The Mayans believed the endangered Moon-goddess was saved by a rabbit hero, who could hop with ease between this world and the Otherworld. In many cultures, rabbits are symbols of plenty and proliferation. They appear in myths and fables as tricksters and wily conmen. Their relationship with humans, however, has always been regrettably tied up with food.

The original ancestors of Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail and Peter were in fact Franco, Maria, Consuela and Pedro. Rabbits, for all their timidity and cuteness, come from Spain. Nobody saw a bunny outside the Iberian peninsula until the third century BC, when Roman legionaries began bringing live rabbits home to breed as a cheap form of meat. From Italy, they bred copiously across central Europe, and were brought to England by the 11th-century Norman invaders. Shrewd rabbit-breeders confined them to paved courtyards, forcing them to breed above ground. According to Alan Davidson, author of The Penguin Companion to Food, new-born rabbits were a popular dish because they weren't strictly considered meat and could be eaten on Fridays when Christian believers had to abstain from meat and eat fish instead. Full-grown rabbits were eaten as a delicacy in the Middle Ages, skinned and roasted whole with a tart sauce made from ginger and crab apples or sour grapes.

But rabbits are born to proliferate and, assisted by forward-thinking sailors who took to releasing breeding pairs on islands they visited, in order to have a ready supply of food on the doorstep, they began to appear, in increasing numbers, all over the world. Cooks in Britain experimented with stuffed rabbit, stewed rabbit casserole and baked rabbit pie. In the 18th century, farmers kept them in home-made warrens with traps sunk into the ground to catch them. Breeding the energetic fornicators was as cheap as chips and simple as sums. They flogged the fur to market and the flesh to the poorer classes who couldn't afford beef, lamb or poultry. A popular country verse in the early 19th century ran:

For rabbits young and rabbits old,

For rabbits hot and rabbits cold,

For rabbits tender, rabbits tough

We thank thee, Lord; we've had enough.

Humans decided they'd had enough of rabbits in the 1950s, when their population reached 100 million. In a sickening echo of the Final Solution, the myxomatosis virus was deliberately introduced into Europe and Australia to exterminate rabbits in millions. It was a big success. It wiped out 95 per cent of the breed. "A baby rabbit/ With eyes full of pus/ Is the wonder of scientific/ Us", wrote Spike Milligan with crushing scorn.

Since those days, we've ceased to think of the little beasts as vermin. The public image of rabbits gradually improved. Mostly it was thanks to Warner Brothers, who gave us Bugs Bunny in the 1940s, and Robert Zemeckis, who gave us Roger (and, more importantly, Jessica) Rabbit in the 1980s. The former was a sassy trickster full of cigar-like carrot flourishes, the latter a film stuntman and his phenomenally unfaithful and pneumatic wife. Richard Adams's Watership Down elevated rabbits to a mythical status they'd long relinquished, as Fiver and his band of refugees headed for the Promised Land. Even John Updike seemed to tip his creative cap to the breed in nicknaming Harry Angstrom, the paradigmatic all-American hero of his best novels, as "Rabbit". We think we're pretty well disposed towards the hopping, powder-puff-tailed, buck-toothed creatures. When the film director Adrian Lyne wanted to suggest the profundity of Glenn Close's vindictive madness in Fatal Attraction, how better than by having her boil Michael Douglas's daughter's pet bunny? We know that Gene Hackman loves his rabbit, and Bridget Fonda and Rutger Hauer, and Suggs from Madness and Toyah Wilcox all love theirs. But celebrities apart, something has gone badly wrong with our attitude to them.

For Sally Machell's sanctuary is only one of 300 such operations in the UK. Try to imagine 300 Battersea Dog's Homes, nationwide, and you begin to see the scale of the problem. This weekend, as we scrutinise the displays of seasonal cards featuring the noisome Easter Bunny who "traditionally", I'm told, brings children chocolate eggs – a tradition about as old as the "trick-or-treat" rituals that have hi-jacked British Halloween revels in the past three years – spare a thought for the real bunnies. According to figures from the Rabbit Welfare Association (RWA), the number of "unwanted" rabbits has lately gone through the hutch roof.

The RWA has for years been monitoring the number of unwanted rabbits in this country. "The number keeps rising all the time" says Anne Mitchell, its spokeswoman. "The most recent official figure was 33,000, but I think it's a great deal more than that now. And those are only the living rabbits we know about. Lots more are simply killed by their owners, or put down by vets because they're not wanted, or released into the wild, where they could live for only a couple of days."

There's a lot of evidence that Easter is a key time for impulse-buying rabbits. It's something to do with the warmer weather, the lambing season, the onset of daffodils and visits to National Trust houses – things that make the British heart go soft and family-centric and rus in urbe. In the spring, to adapt Tennyson's words, a young family's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of pets. "They've got a car, a TV, a fridge and a computer, and think, somehow, they must have a rabbit," says Mitchell. "But they don't realise that a rabbit isn't a cheap or easy pet to keep. They need vaccinating against myxomatosis, which is rife and passed on by flying insects such as dragonflies. Two injections a year costs £50. And they have to be neutered – which costs a further £60 – or the females will show aggression, because they're very territorial, and the males will spray yellow gunk all over you and try to mount your arm or your leg."

"And rabbits are prey animals", said Sally Machell. "They're not suitable pets for young children. People think they're cute and cuddly and friendly, but nothing could be further from the truth. Their mission in life is to get away from creatures trying to kill them. If someone swoops down and tries to pick them up, they will panic and think something's trying to eat them. They'll do anything to get away, including break their own legs."

Perhaps as a retreat from such rabbity aggression – remember the killer rabbit that attacked President Jimmy Carter by clambering, piratically, into his fishing boat on a lake in Georgia and prompted the folk singer Tom Paxton to compose the immortal song, "I Don't Wanna Bunny Wunny in my Widda Wow-Boat"? – many modern owners consign their problematic pets to a hutch at end of the garden, "where," says Mitchell sternly, "they live in a hutch-penned hell, in solitary confinement. We sometimes wonder how many of them die at the end of the garden because of neglect, because their teeth grow too big for them to eat properly. Rabbits in the wild live in groups. They're not meant to be solitary. But children often grow tired of them after a couple of months because they won't play with them. People say to me, 'The rabbit either digs up my garden or just sits there and doesn't do anything.' Well, what do they expect them to do – hand-stands?"

So here is the problem, revealed at last. Rabbits, after being mythologised for centuries as brave and resourceful, then cartoon-ised as irrepressibly cheeky and cute, are the victims of a modern malaise. For the technologically sophisticated young ingrates spawned by the postwar generation, with their PlayStations and taste for instant gratification, rabbits are, frankly, too boring to be any use. There is no Darwinian answer to this evolutionary conundrum. They cannot, at this late stage of their development, start obeying commands to "roll over" and "play dead" and "jump up and shake hands". They are doomed to be, above all others, The Ignored Pet, less fun than guinea pigs, hamsters, white mice or stick insects, doomed to occupy the bottom of the pet hierarchy along with goldfish. The average British child is programmed to go off them in a matter of weeks. However galling it may seem to the British Rabbit Council, which hosts display shows of Lionheads and Netherlands and Dwarf Lops in a simulacrum of Crufts Dog Show, rabbits have, it seems, a built-in obsolescence factor: they are just too lacking in entertainment value to survive much exposure to the human race, outside a few thousand, kindly-disposed devotees who admire their hushed and nibbly stillness.

But there is one place for rabbits in modern life. We can still celebrate their charm and vigour, their gamey adventurousness, in the kitchen. These days, gourmet rabbit-fanciers can choose from a whole smorgasbord of recipes: the late Elizabeth David's French Provincial Cooking offers the classic Sauce au Vin du Medoc, (or Rabbit, Beef and Pork Stewed in Red Wine); Prue Leith recommends Mustard Rabbit, marinaded overnight (because wild rabbit needs tenderising); Claire Macdonald, of the Kinloch Lodge Hotel on Skye, is keen on Jugged Rabbit with forcemeat balls, and recommends, "if you shoot your own rabbits", that you collect the blood for the jugging process; Nigella Lawson has a witty recipe called Peter Rabbit in Mr McGregor's Salad, which involves lettuce leaves and radishes – Peter's favourite food – along with joined sections of the hapless Peter himself. The more adventurous can cook rabbit with peanut sauce, as they do in Chile, or with coconut and peppers, as is common in Colombia, while back in their native Spain, rabbits can be found seething away in a casserole with ham, wine, brandy and garlic.

But don't, gentle reader, try socialising them or making them part of the paraphernalia of your children's outdoor nursery. The Easter Bunny is a chimera, like Santa Claus. Bugs Bunny, for all his charm, is a fiction. Think of Sally and Anne and the other 298 wardens of bunny refuges and just say no to any impulse of incarceration. Think: run, rabbit, run...