The bunnies of Denver
Spring is returning to Denver, and soon, the bunnies will be back and running rampant on the streets surrounding campus. Last year was the first time I noticed the disturbing overpopulation of bunnies in our area. In the spring when I started running again I could not ignore their presence. No matter the time of day I would see probably 100 bunnies per run.
Where are these bunnies coming from? It felt like if I turned over a rock I would find 4 bunnies underneath it. There would be 3-10 bunnies hopping around for every yard that I passed by. I had never seen so many bunnies in my life. I am from Connecticut where the bunnies have plenty of food, space to roam, safe habitat, temperate climate in the warmer months, so why were there so many more in packed neighborhood streets of Denver’s urban sprawl?
I have a few theories. Bunnies are rodents, they hop around in plains where they can eat the grass they hide in. They have plenty of sources of water and plenty of places to live and reproduce. As the area continues to metropolize, none of these things are lost by the bunnies. They still have grass, water, and space. However, their predators have been displaced by the humans. With no one hunting the bunnies, they are free to multiply exponentially.
Soon the bunnies will have taken over! I feel really disturbed by the enormity of their presence. They trigger the same unsettled feeling of picking up a soda can off the pavement and realizing it has been infested with ants. The bunnies are literally everywhere.
If things don’t change, and a new predator doesn’t enter their ecosystem, the bunnies’ greatest predator will become themselves. It is an interesting parallel to human evolution. To me, the bunnies running around and emerging from every dark crevice is representative of the most recent centuries of human: overpopulation, food scarcity, drought, and poverty have not stopped us from continuing this doomed upward trajectory towards progress and further industrializing the Earth.
The bunnies continue to reproduce extravagantly, blind to the dizzying fluctuation in their population. Like the bunnies, we continue to avert our eyes at stoplights when people without homes beg for change and try to ignore the recent catastrophic developments of climate change. We can only focus on our own individual experiences, and can’t wrap our heads around what we are not directly affected by. I heard this week that a certain percentage of the composition of every human alive right now is plastic.
We paste shiny techno fixes over our world on fire like bandaids on gunshot wounds. We hop around oblivious, just like the bunnies.
