Jack Duggan’s Reviews > Raising Hare: A Memoir > Status Update

Final chapter before the epilogue, and the author is finally showing some self-awareness a s reflection. She asserts multiple times in this chapter that she hasn’t domesticated the hare, but the book leading up to this shows time and again a creature that is totally habituated to her and living in her home, and is significantly out of the natural order. Also again reinforces this only happened because she is rich

A section involving a story was actually really gripping, and the leverets are all so cute in their descriptions. The author, though, has very clearly abandoned the idea that they’d ’just raise the hare long enough to return to nature’ and is now just fully treating it as a pet. I think she’s taken pains not to anthropomorphise the animals, but inadvertently still manages occasionally.

While thinking about why I’m not enjoying this much, I thought about it I’d enjoy it more as a film and realised what the problem is: good storytelling thrives on “show, don’t tell”, but because of the format telling is all this can do. A film, or a traditional novel, could portray things with nuance through imagery, but by forcing it into concretised words it feels clumsy and without depth

Another chapter full of descriptions of treating the hare like a pet instead of a wild animal, wild lecturing on how important nature is 🙃

The descriptions of the leveret’s behaviour in this chapter were so immersive and enchanting, which has been a welcome change of pace.

The description of bringing it inside to keep it out of the rain really make it clear it didn’t seem like there was much serious intention of rewilding it.

Chloe Dalton; “I will not habituate the Leveret to humans”

Also Chloe Dalton: *repeated descriptions of habituating the Leveret to humans*

(The bit on Superfetation was pretty cool though)

If I didn’t know better I’d almost accuse this of being AI-generated. It honestly feels like reading from a Wikipedia entry for hares at times, just lists of facts and quotes on most pages, and WAY too finely-detailed when it’s not

So far this seems to be the story of a woman doggedly refusing to accept accountability for having basically doomed a young hare, framed as “fighting to keep it alive”, and then obstinately refusing to use her clearly considerable wealth to entrust care to literally anyone remotely qualified to do it instead of her. Poor decision-making fuelled entirely by pride, even if this was during the heights of Covid