how can you tell if a rabbit possesses the gift of prophecy or not
I want to win Best of Show at a 4H competition for prognosticating rabbits
Oh, good luck! The issue isn’t actually whether they can tell the future– all rabbits are clairvoyant to a certain degree. What you want to breed for is precision as well as clarity.
The current 4H show trials involve getting the rabbits to predict the outcome of a horse race (via nibbling alfalfa out of a cup with a picture of the winning horse on it). Many rabbits can predict the horses that will run well over the course of the racing season, but you want to breed for a rabbit that can predict a specific race in the immediate future. So, it’s all about narrowing that window of vision.
That said, this is obviously the strategy for show rabbits. If you’re aiming for the rabbit equivalent of the kwisatz haderach, you don’t want to narrow that window of prognostication at all.
My chief concern is that heritable rabbit clairvoyance seems to be negatively correlated with vitality. Rabbits that are heterozygous for the prognostication gene (Pp) tend to be moderately clairvoyant but feeble and small in size, prone to anxiety and stress—their visions are vague and symbolic. Rabbits that are homozygous for prognostication (pp) tend to have visions that are both more accurate and more precise, but also display a failure to thrive; even when they do survive to sexual maturity, they are almost always infertile.
Which begs the question: is it animal cruelty to attempt breed prognostication into rabbits, if it reduces their quality of life so dramatically? I know some animal rights groups are lobbying to have clairvoyant rabbits barred from show. I doubt they will succeed since there is so much financial incentive to be made off breeding for clear, precise, and accurate rabbit prognostication… but I think we have to consider the ethical implications even if it remains legal.
One interesting study I read recently showed that rabbits bred to prophesize only in abstract concepts tend to be more healthy and hale than those trained on naturalistic variables like horse racing and weather patterns. The conclusion was that rabbits experience the most psychological distress when they understand the nature and content of their visions, but are nearly unaffected when the content has no meaning to them—suggesting a potential application in the stock market.
Reblogging especially for the deep dive into the ethics of breeding prophetic rabbits for show. It’s an important issue that I don’t see enough folks talking about. I wasn’t aware of the vitality issue, and this post reminded me to get current with the science.
I think my main concern with the study you mention above– if I’m thinking about the right one (A Sense of Impending Doom: Semiotic Stress Syndrome and Prognostication in Domesticated Rabbit Populations?) is that it was, like so many studies in this area, funded by an investment firm. I feel it’s not unreasonable to suggest that they might have ulterior motives in encouraging breeders to focus their efforts on refining rabbit lines that foresee exclusively abstract concepts.
That isn’t to say that more precise prognostication isn’t stressful for rabbits; I’m just doubtful of the validity of the claim that abstraction is somehow better for them.
That is the study… I had no idea who funded it! Now that you mention it, I absolutely can see the ulterior motive in promoting the idea that rabbits can/should only be used for abstract prophecy. You don’t actually need a rabbit to issue clear or accurate prophecies about something like the stock market—you just need people to believe that it can, “leak” those supposed prophecies, and voila! they fulfill themselves.
I have also read that wild rabbits tend to produce only one prophet per warren, regardless of population size. Does that produced one likely pp kit were actually observed culling extraneous pp kits in the same and subsequent litters. You would think that having multiple prophets in a warren would be beneficial, but I guess rabbits have never read The Minority Report.
(via excusemethatsnotcanon)