5 86 THE CHINCHILLA. 



drink, but obtain the needful moisture from the green herbage on which they feed. But 

 in the open country, they always feed while the dew lies heavily upon every blade, 

 which is never the case with the green food with which our domestic Rabbits are supplied. 

 Moreover, we feed our Rabbits very largely on bran, pollard, oats, and other dry 

 nourishment which they do not obtain in their normal state of freedom. The mother 

 Rabbit instinctively licks her young when they are born, and is evidently liable to an 

 exceeding desire for liquid nourishment which prompts her to eat anything that may 

 assuage her burning thirst. A Rabbit, which had already killed and begun to eat one 

 of her offspring, has been seen to leave the half-eaten body and to run eagerly to a pan 

 of water which was placed in her hutch. It may easily be supposed that when an 

 animal is obliged to afford a constant supply of liquid nourishment to her young, she is 

 forced to imbibe a sufficiency of fluid to enable her to comply with the ever recurring 

 demands of her offspring. 



Rabbits are terribly destructive animals, as is too well known to all residents near a 

 warren, and are sad depredators in field, garden, and plantation, destroying in very 

 wantonness hundreds of plants which they do not care to eat. They do very great 

 damage to young trees, delighting in stripping them of the tender bark as far as they 

 can reach while standing on their hind feet. Sometimes they eat the bark, but in many 

 cases they leave it in heaps upon the ground, having chiselled it from the tree on which 

 it grew, and to which it afforded nourishment, merely for the sake of exercising their 

 teeth and keeping them in proper order, just as a cat delights in clawing the legs of 

 chairs and tables. 



When the Rabbits have begun to devastate a plantation, they will continue their 

 destructive amusement until they have killed every tree in the place, unless they are 

 effectually checked. There are only two methods of saving the trees one by killing all 

 the Rabbits, and the other by making them disgusted with their employment. The latter 

 plan is generally the most feasible, and can be attained by painting each tree with a strong 

 infusion of tobacco, mixed with a sufficiency of clay and other substances to make it 

 adhere to the bark. This mixture should be copiously applied to the first three feet of 

 every tree, so that the Rabbit cannot find any portion of the bark that is not impregnated 

 with the nauseous compound, and is an effectual preservative against their attacks. 



In their normal state of freedom, Rabbits feed exclusively on vegetable food, but in 

 domestication they will eat a very great variety of substances. Many of my own Rabbits 

 were very fond of sweetmeats, and would nibble a piece of hardbake with great enjoyment, 

 though they were always much discomposed by the adhesive nature of their strange diet, 

 and used to shake their heads violently from side to side when they found themselves 

 unable to disengage their teeth. They would also eat tallow candles, a fact which I 

 discovered accidentally, by seeing them devour a candle-end that had fallen out of an old 

 lantern. These curious predilections were the more unaccountable, because the animals 

 were most liberally supplied with food, and were also permitted to run in the kitchen 

 garden for a limited time daily, and to feed upon the growing lettuces, parsley, carrots, 

 and other vegetables, as they pleased. 



As a general fact, the Rabbit has a great antipathy to the hare, so that the two animals 

 are seldom, if ever, seen in close proximity. The possibility of a hybrid progeny be- 

 tween the two species was, until late years, entirely denied. There are, however, several 

 accidental instances of such a phenomenon, and in every case the father has been a 

 Rabbit and the mother a hare. There are many examples of young Rabbits which 

 possess much of the coloring and general aspect of the hare, but these are almost in- 

 variably the offspring of domesticated Rabbits which have been turned into a warren. 



In its native state, the fur of the Rabbit is of nearly uniform brown, but when the 

 animal is domesticated, its coat assumes a variety of hues, such as pure white, jetty black, 

 pied, dun, slaty-gray, and many other tints. 



The CHINCHILLA, so well known for its exquisitely soft and delicate fur, belongs to the 

 group of animals which are known to zoologists under the title of Jerboidae, and which 

 are remarkable for the great comparative length of their hinder limbs, and their long 

 hair-clothed tails. 



