By: Dean Vaglia | C&G Newspapers | Published October 11, 2025
METRO DETROIT — They are small, brown and everywhere, and boy, do they hop.
Rabbits do not need much more of an introduction. Anyone who has spent time in southeastern Michigan has seen their share and more of wild rabbits — particularly, the widely abundant eastern cottontail — but aside from a jump scare while driving or a fleeting critter spotted while out and about, the actual role and purpose of rabbits tends to go unknown to the average Michigander.
Which begs the question: What even is a rabbit?
For starters, a rabbit is not a rodent — it’s an entirely different animal altogether.
“(Rabbits) are within the order Lagomorpha, taxonomically,” said KR Vedolich, a naturalist with the Burgess-Shadbush Nature Center in Shelby Township. “They are genetically distinct from a lot of different kinds of animals … and this is the group that contains rabbits and hares and pikas. They are separate rodents and rodents are in their own taxonomic order, Rodentia.”
The eastern cottontail rabbit is native to Michigan, having been in the eastern part of North America for millions of years. For all of that time rabbits have played a key role in how the natural environment of the region has functioned, even if most of what they do is hidden from the surface view.
“They’re a good herbivore to clean up our forest floor to help control plant populations,” Vedolich said. “After a rabbit eats it has to digest that food and then poop it out. That poop provides important resources for other animals in the area. Think of dung beetles or any other kind of insect that might relish those nutrients (in the poop) and break those down further to help fertilize the soil. There’s multiple steps of moving energy around the ecosystem.”
Another step in the energy-moving process is the rabbit’s role as a prey animal that is eaten by other animals within the environment, therefore passing energy along the food chain. Beyond moving energy, rabbits also move plenty of dirt by building underground tunnels — and not just for rabbits.
“They build really extensive burrow systems which are actually quite sophisticated,” Vedolich said. “They can have dozens, even over 100 different entrances into a single burrow system … But those burrows are not only important for the rabbit itself to find shelter from predators. Those kinds of burrow systems that rabbits build are also important for other types of wildlife as well. Animals like snakes may take advantage of the additional shelter. Skunks might also use rabbit burrows. Things like groundhogs, chipmunks, even turtles can find their way (into burrows). It’s a really cool thing. They provide a lot of services to the environment.”
Rabbits and humans have always had an interesting relationship. Along with being a prey animal hunted for fur and food for centuries, more recent development patterns in the region have seen wild rabbits go through a cyclical relationship with the lands they live on.
“In the original forest there may have been a very healthy population of rabbits that, with initial urban development, was probably pushed out by all of the noise, changing structures (and) heavy equipment,” Vedolich said. “But as time goes on, let’s say that (a) subdivision is now established. The ground is settling, homes are settling, you may have more people in an area which is a deterrent for rabbits to be nearby — but it also might mean that their predators may not be around. When it comes to rabbits in an urban landscape, there’s a benefit of being around because they have more ornamental plants they can eat and there’s potentially less predation pressure on those animals within an urban environment.”
But for all their interactions with humans and the world built by humans, wild rabbits like the eastern cottontail are an entirely separate species from the domestic rabbits that make up one of the county’s most popular — and most abandoned — pets. While eastern cottontails are a local species, domestic rabbits have a lineage of Iberian rabbits bred by Romans for the purpose of harvesting meat and furs.
“When that wild-type rabbit was domesticated, all its fearful traits were bred out,” Vedolich said. “It’s just like how dogs were domesticated from wolves. You breed a litter, you choose the calmest (and) most agreeable ones, you breed those ones so that over generations the rabbits that you find are lacking a lot of the flight and fear responses. Domestication has actually changed the structure of the domesticated rabbit’s brain such that within a domesticated rabbit’s brain, the amygdala (the part responsible for fear) is greatly reduced in comparison to a wild rabbit.”
Given the docility bred into domestic rabbits over so many generations, abandoning one in the wild under the assumption it can survive is essentially giving it a death sentence.
“It would be no different than if you thought of dumping your cat or your dog,” Macomb County Animal Control Director Jeff Randazzo said. “These are animals that have already been acclimated to human interactions, humans feeding them, watering them, all those things and all of a sudden, all of those stop. They do not know how to free graze. And they are susceptible because they weren’t born in the wild, they are not going to — in my opinion — take cover or know that harm is on the way.”
Randazzo recommends that looking to take on a domestic rabbit as a pet should study the way rabbits behave in captivity, seek an animal through a trusted rescue agency and get all the proper vaccines for the rabbit.
While the face and shape of metro Detroit is set to change with new developments and further expansions northward and westward, Vedolich believes the eastern cottontail’s history of resilience will lead to a future where wild rabbits will remain a fixture of the southeastern Michigan ecosystem for decades to come.
“The eastern cottontail rabbit is a very resilient animal,” Vedolich said. “It has the ability to produce multiple litters of rabbits every year. They can go through a lot of change and adapt to it over time, whether that change is because of human development or whether the change is because of overarching continuous dynamics with predator populations as well. Populations can go up and down, but rabbits are very good at compensating for any large hits. They’re really resilient animals. I would say if we start to see more of a public passion for conserving our wild spaces, I think the rabbit has a really good shot of being with us for a long, long time.”