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The Tale of the Wild Rabbit and the Iberian Lynx
How the Iberian Lynx is clawing its way back from the brink of extinction.
In 1984, there was an outbreak of a new infectious disease among domestic rabbits in the Jiangsu Province of China. It was something never seen before; infected animals succumbed in the span of three days of the onset of fever with liver failure and internal bleeding. The disease was both extremely lethal and highly contagious, and within a year it had killed over 140 million rabbits in China alone.
In two years, the novel disease now named Rabbit Hemorrhagic Disease (RHD) had reached Europe. First reported in Italy, it soon spread across the continent to the Iberian Peninsula where it found indigenous populations of the European Rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus), with Spain reporting its first case in 1988, followed by Portugal in 1989.
When the RHD Virus arrived in the Peninsula, the European Rabbit, colloquially known as wild rabbit, was struggling to adapt to another viral disease — Myxomatosis, an illness indigenous to South America, which provoked skin lesions and respiratory distress in these animals. This disease had been intentionally introduced in Europe by French farmers in 1953, to control rabbit populations in their fields.