Animal rights groups have used the Easter holiday to flag up the plight of rabbits farmed and fattened for food in Germany. The legislation is not strong enough to protect the animals from suffering, they say.
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Animal rights groups have marked the Christian holiday with a plea to end the cruelty to farmed rabbits in Germany.
The German animal protection organization Deutscher Tierschutzbundreleased a statement at Easter this year claiming that most farmed rabbits were still being kept in extremely cruel conditions. Some 30 million rabbits are consumed in Germany every year, roughly a quarter of which are slaughtered and eaten around the Easter holiday, while others are sold and given as presents.
"Not even the animals' basic needs are covered in rabbit farms," Deutscher Tierschutzbund's Esther Müller said in a statement. "The rabbits live crammed together in barred cages in poorly ventilated halls. This has nothing to do with the idyll of a rabbit hopping on a green meadow."
The organization, which represents 740 local animal rights groups and boasts 800,000 members, says the conditions that rabbits are kept under lead to injuries and abscesses on the animals' paws, as well as digestion problems because of the poor diet.
The rabbits also show signs of psychological disturbances, including aggression, which the group puts down to the lack of space and the lack of materials like soft wood for them to chew.
Poor regulation is better than none
Rabbit farming is one of the last areas in industrial animal husbandry to introduce welfare standards. While many European countries have no regulations at all, the German government only built a special "rabbit provision" into the country's animal protection laws in 2014. It stipulates minimum standards for the care of farmed rabbits, including the size and structure of cages, which are supposed to provide different spaces for activity and rest. Farm workers are also obliged to check the animals twice a day for signs of illness.
"This is the first time we have ever had detailed standards and clear regulations on farming rabbits for commercial purposes," Agriculture Minister Christian Schmidt said at the time, before calling the law "another step on the way to animal protection in livestock husbandry."
But animal rights groups beg to differ. "Caged housing without space to move remains the status quo," the Deutscher Tierschutzbundsaid in a statement last week, claiming that the law left rabbits with "completely insufficient" protection.
According to the Albert Schweitzer Foundation, another German animal rights organization, farmed rabbits are fed dry energy-rich pellets designed to make them as fat as possible in the shortest amount of time - they are often slaughtered when aged only 84-90 days, by which time they've reached a weight of three kilos (6.6 pounds).
Meat production
Germany's rabbit farmers, on the other hand, have completely different concerns. According to Werner Ziegler, director of the BVK, the association of rabbit-meat producers, Germany's welfare standards are too high, and so leave farmers struggling to compete with cheaper rabbit meat from Italy and Germany's eastern European neighbors.
"Consumers only pay for the expensive farming in Germany at store counters in a very limited way," Ziegler told the "taz" newspaper.
There is a campaign afoot in the European Union to counter this by introducing EU-wide minimum standards for farming rabbits, which already exist for pigs, calves and chickens.
According to Sven Giegold, a member of the European Parliament for the German Green party, this is vital because three-quarters of Europe's farm rabbits are being kept in Italy, Spain and France, which have no rabbit-farming standards at all.
This would also be happy news for Ziegler too: "We were always in favor of a European standard," he told "taz." "Minimum EU standards would give German producers similar conditions to French, Spanish and other farmers."
Rabbits - not just for Easter
Animal protection groups were also keen to use the Easter holidays to warn people against giving rabbits as gifts. "Rabbits are very unsuited as pets for children," the Deutscher Tierschutzbundsaid in its statement, "because constant lifting, stroking, and cuddling mean stress for the animals. On top of that, many people underestimate the fact that rabbits can reach 10 years and older, and a small cage in a child's room or living room is not enough. These animals need a lot of space, and, as social animals, should be kept at least in pairs."
According to the Albert Schweitzer Foundation, rabbits maintain complex social relationships in the wild, and like to live in large colonies comprising two or three males, several females and their young. These colonies can extend to some 110 underground chambers.
Uncaged! When animals escape their zoos
Animal rights groups are calling for an indepenent investigation after silverback gorilla Kumbuka escaped his enclosure and was subdued by a tranquilizer dart. Click for more on Kumbuka, and other noteworthy "zoobreaks."
Image: picture-alliance/AP Photo/K. Wigglesworth
Kumbuka escapes in 'minor incident'
London Zoo on Friday called the male western lowland gorilla's escape from its enclosure a "minor incident" that posed no danger to the public. He was out of his enclosure for around an hour, ultimately subdued with a tranquilizer dart. Armed police were deployed. The zoo could not say precisely how Kumbuka got loose, but announced that an investigation was underway.
Image: picture-alliance/AP Photo/K. Wigglesworth
Big man on campus
Kumbuka escaped into what the zoo described as a "non-public keeper area." According to a Buzzfeed article citing a zoo source, the ape ("a f------ psycho") had a history of acting up. Eyewitnesses had said he was aggressive and banging the glass prior to the incident. Speaking to the BBC, the zoo's curator of mammals said such behavior was common by males seeking to impress females.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/ZSL
People told to stay indoors with gorilla loose
Visitors and staff were locked inside zoo buildings, part of standard emergency procedure, while the case was dealt with. Some reported on their own brief taste of zoo captivity via social media. According to figures from the UK's Association of Leading Visitor Attractions (AVLA), London Zoo attracts around 1.25 million visitors per year, just enough to make the AVLA's top 25 crowd-pullers.
Image: picture-alliance/AP Photo/M. Dunham
Duisburg Zoo orangutan shot at perimeter
An orangutan in Duisburg fared worse than Kumbuka during his August 2015 breakout. By the time the zoo became aware he was on the loose and laid eyes on him, he was already climbing the outer perimeter fence. Zoo officials said it was then too late to risk a tranquilizer dart, which may not sedate large animals immediately. Female Manggali (pictured here) shared the enclosure with him.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/R. Weihrauch
Five chimps flee Hannover Zoo
June 2012: a broken branch offers a group of five chimpanzees a new way up and over their fence at Hannover Zoo. During their flight, they overran and injured a five-year-old girl. They were recovered without suffering any violence in the end, tempted back by calls from their keepers.
A snow leopard named Irbis, rather larger and a touch less cute than this cub from the same Wuppertal Zoo enclosure, slipped his cage this September. People were ordered indoors and staff dispatched to deal with the situation. Within around 15 minutes of the breakout, a vet located and tranquilized the endangered mammal. Between 4,000 and 7,000 snow leopards are thought to remain in the wild.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
Looking for love, but not in a cage
Staff at the Nandankanan Zoo in India had an odd experience with a wild male tiger in 2013. They gave him a home on discovering him lurking around the enclosure's tigress. A month later, though, he seemingly decided love wasn't quite worth captivity - jumping an 18-foot (4.6 meter) wire fence to return to a bachelor's life at large.
Image: Imago/Nature Picture Library
Raccoon digs for freedom, returns for mate
A raccoon at the small Tropiquaria conservation house and zoo in Somerset, southwest England, used unusually wet weather to make her escape. She was able to dig her way out with the ground softened. A search was launched, without success, but Missy eventually returned to the male in her pen of her own free will. Perhaps after realizing there were no wild raccoons in the region?
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/L. Klimek
Gimme a rock, I'll break the lock
Capuchin monkeys are notoriously smart and sociable - probably why they're becoming a popular pet for the Justin Bieber's of this world. In the wild, they've been observed using rocks as tools, for instance cracking nuts. And in a Brazil zoo in 2012, they did just the same - smashing the locks in their pen and walking out the door.
Image: DW/V. Kleber
Humboldt penguin settles in Tokyo Bay
A penguin at the Tokyo Sea Life Park mysteriously managed to escape his aquarium's walled and fenced enclosure in 2012. Known only as penguin 337, staff launched a frenzied search, fearing that the 1-year-old wouldn't do well in the wild after a life in captivity. They found him two months later in Tokyo Bay seemingly well-fed and healthy, and opted to leave him be.
Image: picture alliance/dpa/I. Wagner
Porcupine flees, fights, and falls
Back in Germany, a zoo near Hanover lost porcupine Hartmut in 2014 to an open gate, in what might have been an act of sabotage. The prickly fellow showed some real wanderlust, roaming around 5 kilometers from his former home, and putting three of his sharp spines into a fireman trying to round the critter up. His tale ended, alas, under the wheels of a train.
Image: picture-alliance/Arco Images GmbH
Rusty, Matt and Luri - rogue red pandas
The Opel Zoo in the western German state of Hesse lost a red panda couple for around two days back in 2008, believing that the creatures used bamboo plants to climb to freedom. They were recovered safely, as was Rusty - a young red panda in Washington D.C. who became something of an online celebrity during his brief escape foraging for food. These baby twins were brought to Berlin's zoo in 2011.
Image: Getty Images/S. Gallup
Serial 'escape artist' Roy
Also in 2008, Osnabrück's zoo twice lost track of a male wolf named Roy. His more dramatic second attempt, around a month after the first, involved him jumping his enclosure's borders, tearing away part of the electric fence in the process. He was recovered in the northern German city within a couple of hours though.