The hare-raising experience that changed my life

One wintry day during lockdown, the parliamentary political adviser Chloe Dalton discovered a new-born leveret on the track by her converted barn. It was only as long as her palm’s width, with a white star shape on its forehead. Ambivalent about interfering, she nonetheless gave it houseroom, despite being warned that brown hares can never really be domesticated. This book, her first, is the chronicle of how the animal changed her life.

If, like me, you have become leery of the subgenre (even though this example comes larded with plaudits from Angelina Jolie and Michael Morpurgo) and feel that such writing peaked with Virgil’s apocryphal elegy to his pet housefly, you will find Raising Hare notably different. For a start, the hare of the title (never named nor properly tamed) is no pet, and the author is an unlikely candidate for such experiences, being a committedly urban, globetrotting professional who has not cared for an animal since the age of eight and seems hitherto largely heedless of the natural world.

Not everyone likes hares. Unlike rabbits, their fellow lagomorphs, they are not quite cute, and have historically been regarded as uncanny. They are fabulous beasts, with magical and shamanistic associations, not simply as witches’ familiars. They were sacred to the Teutonic dawn goddess Eostre, for instance – and became the Easter Bunny. They can leap six feet, accelerate for their body length faster than a cheetah, and, when wounded, shriek like a mandrake. After reading this book, you might want to think twice about ordering that pappardelle alla lepre.

Aware from the outset of the tricky balance between sanctuary and independence for her ‘little one’, but uncertain as to anything else about ‘harekind’ (even the vet has minimal experience), Dalton initially bottle-feeds it, then gleans a clue from the moody poet William Cowper, who recommended oats: one of his three hares lived until the age of 11, though she still bit him.