Cute Endangered Animal: Pygmy Rabbit

Photo courtesy Oregon Zoo.

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


This week’s cute endangered animal is the pygmy rabbit, which hails from my home state of Oregon, as well as Washington and Idaho. The pygmy rabbit is the smallest in the US, weighing just 1 pound. It’s also one of two wild rabbit species in North America that digs its own burrows, and communicates vocally with squeaks, squeals, and chuckles.

Despite the stereotype of rabbits breeding like, well, rabbits, the pygmy rabbit is quite close to extinction due to increasing agriculture, and possibly disease. The rabbits live pretty much on just one food source: sagebrush. Now you might think sagebrush is epic in the West: Is there a Western that’s complete without a tangle of sagebrush rolling through the dusty streets right before a shootout? But in reality, sagebrush is becoming less and less common in Oregon since the damming of the Columbia River created more arable land. As a result, dense sagebrush habitat is hard to find in the rabbit’s range, and pockets of it serve to isolate populations.

Until a few years ago, there were two sub-populations of pygmy rabbits: Columbia Basin and Idaho. As of 2002, researchers could only find 16 Columbia Basin pygmy rabbits in the wild, and in 2008, the entire sub-population went extinct when in 2008 the last known purebred Columbia Basin rabbit died in captivity. Since then, conservationists have mulled switching funds from the Columbia Basin preservation program to the Idaho program, since that sub-population is much healthier. Currently, the Oregon Zoo and other organizations are feverishly trying to breed the rabbits in captivity to create species biodiversity.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate