Second paragraph of third chapter:

I found in those books countless descriptions of how to hunt, kill or cook a hare, but not a word on how to raise them. I turned the pages quickly past endless colour reproductions of the still-life paintings featuring dead hares hanging upside down from hooks or slung across tables, their back legs tied with rope and blood pooling beneath their heads, which grace the walls of our galleries and museums. The meat of a single hare is sufficient to satisfy six to eight people, I read. The recipes, many of them ancient, included ‘hare in worts’ (meaning leaf vegetables); hare ‘with blood and bread’, seasoned with pepper and ale; hare with beer and chestnuts; hare with chocolate; hare stew; and lievre à la royale – hare fit for a king. Reportedly first prepared for Louis XIV and described as one of the ‘jewels’ of French haute cuisine, the recipe requires that the animal is boned, stuffed with foie gras, truffles and the meat of its own legs, and served with a red wine sauce fortified with blood. To read these violent accounts in the leveret’s vicinity felt like a form of betrayal.

It is only a few months since I read H is for Hawk, by Helen Macdonald, also an account of a human getting to know and become intimate with an animal, while the human world of the author is in flux – Macdonald is processing grief at the death of their father, Dalton is coping with the pandemic lockdowns. They are very different books though. While Macdonald is telling the story of domesticating a wild animal, Dalton allows the hare that she rescues to grow up and raise its own young alongside her, without constraining it in any way, and I must admit it did make me question how humane falconry can be considered to be.

I also realised how little I know about hares. I’m very familiar with rabbits, both from real life and from literature; I had not taken in that hares basically nest in quiet spots in the open country, and lead largely solitary lives apart from the requirements of breeding. One of the weird bits of hare biology is that doe can be have two different pregnancies simultaneously, so that when one set of leverets is born she may still be carrying their younger siblings.

An intense study of any relationship can be compelling reading, if it is well written – and this is. There’s something particularly fascinating about getting to know a creature whose motivations we can only guess at, especially if it allows us to share a bit of its world. Dalton experiences a new awareness of the natural world around her by observing the hare’s behaviour. This is movingly shadowed against the pandemic when a lot of us found ourselves spending more time with our neighbourhood.

Personally I don’t think I have ever seen a wild hare. (The so-called “Belgian hare” is a very big “fancy” domestic rabbit, as is the Flemish giant.) I’ll keep a closer eye out now.

You can get Raising Hare here.

This was my top unread non-fiction book. Next on that pile is Agathe Christie, by Lucy Worsley.