Growing Greener Podcast – Rabbits with Amy Free

Welcoming Peter Rabbit back into the Garden

Amy Free, rabbit-lover and anthrozoologist, awakens Tom Christopher to the beauties and ecological importance of rabbits and shares how to host them without sacrificing your garden.

August 19, 2026

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Transcript

Growing Greener host Tom Christopher

Welcome to Growing Greener, your guide to environmentally informed gardening. Produced in partnership with the Perfect Earth Project, this program brings you each week some expert who puts you in touch with a different aspect of gardening in partnership with nature. Our goal is to make your personal landscape healthier, more beautiful, more sustainable, and more fun.

This is your host, Tom Christopher, and today I will be talking to Amy Free, a passionate and very knowledgeable advocate for rabbits. In addition to a Bachelor of Science degree in Zoology and Conservation, she has a Master’s degree in Anthrozoology, and she has been an editor and educator for the Wisconsin House Rabbit Society and a contributor to House Rabbit Journal. She’s also an enthusiastic organic, no-till gardener, who is on the map with Homegrown National Park.

As someone who has had a confrontational relationship with rabbits in the past, I must say that Amy’s insights into the gentle and fascinating world of rabbit behavior and ecology have changed my attitudes profoundly.

Before we go to my conversation with Amy, though, I want to thank Growing Greener’s sponsor, the Garden Conservancy, a national nonprofit dedicated to preserving, sharing, and celebrating America’s gardens and diverse gardening traditions. Through preservation, education, and public access, the Conservancy helps protect these living works of art for future generations. Learn more and discover gardens near you at GardenConservancy.org.

Welcome to Growing Greener, Amy.

Amy Free

Thank you, Tom. I am so happy to be here.

Tom Christopher

Amy, you got in touch with me several weeks ago to propose a program about rabbits, and I want to be clear, you weren’t suggesting that we discuss improved devices for banishing rabbits from the landscape or worse. You were interested in promoting coexistence and in sharing your passionate admiration for members of the family Leporidae.

Amy Free

Absolutely. I definitely agree with the motto of this podcast, which is to grow in harmony with nature, so that includes rabbits for me.

Tom Christopher

Can you begin discussing how you became such an admirer of rabbits?

Amy Free

I think it goes back to childhood. So I grew up in the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. We didn’t have a lot of urban wildlife in our yard. We were in a residential area, but we had things like squirrels, occasional chipmunk, typical yard birds, and rabbits. So, we had the Eastern Cottontail, and they would be in our backyard at night or at dusk and be out there just nibbling the grass, and I was enamored of them as a child. I don’t know exactly why, I just was.

Going into adulthood, I learned more about rabbits in my educational degrees, but then I met a friend who had a pet rabbit, a house rabbit, or a domesticated rabbit, as we’d say, and spending time with that rabbit, I was absolutely smitten. And I thought, these are animals, these are a being that are so misunderstood and yet have things to teach us, are absolutely cute, but also smart, which people sell short. From that point on, I just learned more about them, and so I’ve now lived with four different house rabbits in my lifetime. I have two who are right over here next to me, actually, and in the yard, I’ve learned more and more about eastern cottontails and their behavior, and how it’s very possible to garden with them here.

Tom Christopher

We had a house rabbit for a while. My son got a rabbit. It was beautiful and had a lot of personality, but one of the things it was addicted to was biting through electrical cords. It would just jump around the room and snip off all sorts of devices like the phone, and this went on for some time. I got really good at putting new clips and plugs on electrical wires.

Amy Free

So, there is a sort of joke in the rabbit community of the house rabbit world, that cords, like charging cords, electrical cords, are white hay. Hay and grass being the predominant part of a rabbit’s diet, it’s the white hay, it’s the, you know, the covered wires that for some reason attract rabbits. It’s that texture that really appeals to them. I don’t know if we know why exactly. Another common thing is remote buttons for the TV or the Roku and such. Those buttons have that same kind of rubbery texture, and rabbits, if they have a chance, might chew those off. Why, I don’t know.

Tom Christopher

How do you protect wires against your…

Amy Free

Okay, so I firmly believe that house rabbits should be just that, in the house. They should be family members, the same way that Americans are used to having dogs and cats in the house, right? They’re fur babies, they’re our pets, they’re our kids, they’re our family. And so I have free-range house rabbits, which means that we bunny-proof the main room that they stay in, which is our family room. And rather than caging the rabbit, we cage, so to speak, our entertainment center. There is fencing around our entire cabinetry that has the television on it. All the wires are tucked behind there, and the bunnies can’t get behind there.

Also, we do use the cord wraps, the accordion-style hard plastic cord wraps. Mostly just barriers, and it’s the same thing that applies outside in the garden, physical barrier.

Tom Christopher

Yeah, and we do, frankly, the same thing with dogs, too, especially when they’re puppies. So there you go. But to return to the garden, I have to confess at this point that as a gardener, I had an adversarial relationship with rabbits in the past. I was the peculiar little kid who actually rooted for Mr. McGregor when adults read me Beatrix Potter’s book, The Tale of Peter Rabbit. I remember being outraged that Peter got off so lightly after raiding Mr. McGregor’s vegetable garden. Later, when I grew up and had a garden of my own, I started out by favoring an air rifle as the way for dealing with rabbits who dined into my garden. I should say I’ve given that up entirely quite some time ago. But I now use nonviolent means, principally fencing and repellents, for banishing rabbits from areas of the landscape where they could be destructive. But my recent exchange of emails with you has awakened me to a new interest in active coexistence with these creatures. I was just out in a little meadow I planted around my house this morning watching bees and butterflies and goldfinches. Well, rabbits, they’re wildlife, too, and they’re very interesting, according to you.

Amy Free

Very much, yes. Well, first off, on behalf of all the rabbits, thank you for changing your attitude to them. I was definitely a Peter Rabbit fan, also, and thought Mr. McGregor was a big meanie.

Tom Christopher

Okay, we were on opposite sides of the fence.

Amy Free

You’ve come around. Yeah, yeah. So I have spent a lot of time just watching the rabbits in my garden, in my yard, and it’s been interesting because we moved to our current property about 10 years ago and there was almost nothing in our backyard. It was one tiny little vegetable garden, about four by eight, and I have since planted a lot for annuals, for vegetables, and a lot of perennials.

And in that time, I’ve seen a lot of rabbits come through our yard each year. Of course, I have lost a plant or two, yes, and I would love to talk about the reasons why rabbits do chew our plants because it’s not just for eating. So, to your point of living in partnership with them, it’s very possible the more we understand their behavior, and this applies to house rabbits or our wild urban rabbits, the better we can know how to design our landscapes and our gardens to make a coexistence that’s peaceable. And I’ve seen that. I’ve developed my practices here at my own space where rabbits are welcome. They really are not eating my stuff. I pass by them and they don’t run away from me. I have visitors and friends who say, how are your rabbits like so chill? How are they not scattering off from you? Truly, it’s a coexistence. It’s an understanding what they need to feel safe, which we can talk about.

Tom Christopher

Does that apply to your vegetable garden as well, or do you have a vegetable garden?

Amy Free

I do have a vegetable garden. I have a couple of different spots where I grow my veggies. I do have raised beds for the ones that rabbits might like a little bit more. Mind you, I have previously put fencing around one of the raised beds. It was full of sugar snap peas one summer. A mother Cottontail chewed through the fence, got into that bed, made a nest, didn’t touch any of the peas.

Tom Christopher

Really?

Amy Free

At all. I was shocked. And I have some actual adorable photos of her just looking up at me through the fence like, Yep, I’m here. It’s all good. I think it depends a lot on what else you have for them and the environment because something my house rabbits have taught me is that nothing wants to just eat the same thing day after day, right? They have tastes. They have preferences. My female rabbit right now, she, if you give her a plate of mixed greens and vegetables, will always go for the radicchio first. Now to me, in my nose, I cannot tell the difference between, you know, that’s romaine and that’s radicchio just by smell alone, but she can. And our current boy, his favorite thing right now is cilantro.

They have tastes and they want to have a palate that is of variety. With that mother cottontail, I think she had enough other things that were yummy out in the yard that she didn’t have to worry about eating the peas because she was otherwise content.

Tom Christopher

You completed a master’s degree in anthrozoology. Can you tell us briefly what that field of study is about?

Amy Free

Definitely. Anthrozoology, if we break down the word anthro meaning human or culture and zoology being the study of animals, anthrozoology as a whole is a study of human-animal relationships. That includes literally every kind of relationships people have with any kind of animal, from who we bring into our homes to live with versus who we keep outside and maybe decide one day we will eat, how we use animals for understanding literature, understanding marketing and advertising, understanding how our environments interact with animals. It’s literally every kind of way that we interact with animals, from physical interaction to even thinking interaction.

Tom Christopher

Well, I could see how that would really shape your perception of the animals and relationships with them. That sounds very interesting.

Amy Free

It’s a great field. It took me a while to find it, but when I found my master’s program at Canisius University, that was just like coming home to me. It was all of the things that I wanted to learn about, that I believed in, that made me think critically about how I relate to animals in my life. I had a bachelor’s degree in zoology at the time and really had an interest in animal behavior or ethology. So, some of that carried into the Anzo world as well, which was really, really fun, thinking about the mental lives of animals and what do we do for them for enrichment. How do we keep them content and happy and really finding their own umwelt, so to speak.

Tom Christopher

Amy, I need to pause for a moment to remind listeners that this radio station is WESU 88.1 FM and this program is Growing Greener, a weekly conversation about gardening in partnership with nature. This is your host Tom Christopher and today I am speaking to Amy Free about a new and more positive attitude toward rabbits from gardeners.

So to get back to the garden, but also to what rabbits are intrinsically, I think that recognizing they are prey animals, ecologically speaking, is essential to understanding them and their behavior. So a prey animal, in my understanding, is one that’s used as food by predator species such as foxes and coyotes in the case of rabbits. Rabbits are actually very important for nature’s food chain because they consume plants, which are the harvesters of sunlight, and convert the plants into animal tissues, which are the food on which carnivores depend. Rabbits’ status as prey animals, I think, shapes their behavior in many ways. For instance, the prolific breeding for which they’re famous and which is impressive. I did a little reading on Eastern Cottontails and the female of the species, which is the rabbit I see most often in my garden, they mature sexually at the age of just two to three months and thereafter may produce as many as seven litters of young a year, although that’s at the high end. More commonly it’s three to four, but with three to eight young in each litter, that means that a local population of Eastern Cottontail can stand a lot of predation and still thrive, and it also seems to me that if you see a rabbit in your garden, you’re likely to see more there soon. Would you agree with all of this and do you feel that their ecological status is helpful in understanding them?

Amy Free

Yes, I think everything you just explained is spot-on, and their ecological status as a prey species definitely informs their behavior. I think in terms of our experience with them, it does mean that there is a lot of, like you said, turnover. There’s a lot of predation, and so the average lifespan of a cottontail in the urban wild is less than two years. So, they really do exist to be gone, which I think is one of the beauties of them too, is we can use them for thinking and what does that mean to have such a temporal aspect to life.

I think it’s important too to keep in mind that part of being a great animal and avoiding predation is when are you active and when are you resting? Rabbits are crepuscular animals. A lot of people are familiar with the term diurnal or nocturnal. Crepuscular meaning active at dawn and dusk, those twilight hours where us and other predators who have that binocular vision see the worst, right? It’s not bright, it’s not dark, it’s in between. That’s the time when rabbits are going to be active. And at other parts of the day, especially when it is clear vision for all of us predators, they want to be undercover.

That will also impact how they behave in your garden. They want to know where the paths of escape are and they want clear paths of escape. So if something is coming to get them or they have that sense of being startled, they know how to get undercover quickly.

I have seen rabbits chew things down multiple times, not to eat them, but just to make a path of travel and to make their little safe spot. So if you ever notice that, why did they just chew it off and leave it and not eat it? That could very well be why. They’re remodeling for their safety.

Tom Christopher

Fascinating. I’m surprised that they’ll accept your presence nearby because I would think they would see you as a potential predator.

Amy Free

For sure and it does take a little bit of time and I do this every growing season where the new batch of juveniles is starting to hop around. And again, they are very subtle communicators themselves, right? They’re not going to bark at us, but they respond very well to auditory cues. So I announce myself. Maybe my neighbors think it’s weird, but I will literally go outside and I will announce myself to the rabbits so that they know I’m here. I’m not there to ambush them. I’m not there to make a meal out of them. And I think that really helps.

And I also believe in giving them some space. So, I am the person who will take the long way around to let them know that they’re safe and they can keep eating wherever they’re at. And I think that’s one struggle that people have when it comes to rabbits as domestic animals too, is you cannot approach a prey animal or, you know, a rabbit as you would a dog or a cat. You cannot go on up into their face. Plenty of pathologists will tell you that dogs and cats don’t like that a lot either, but they’re more tolerant of it. If you approach a rabbit the way you would a dog, it will respond either aggressively or very fearfully. So, it takes a quiet calm presence when you’re in close proximity to them to build that trust. Not a great pet for kids, honestly, because of that. It’s hard to tell a four-year-old not to touch the cute fluffy bunny.

Tom Christopher

How do they express aggression?

Amy Free

So aggression can look like lunging, of course biting. They have some very strong incisors. They have four actually, like a double set of incisors on top and two on the bottom, which makes them such good chewers. So, they can bite, they can nip. There’s another saying in the rabbit world that a nip is kind of like telling you, hey, knock it off. And if you get bit, that is yelling at you. That is telling you absolutely back off. With other rabbits, you might see them to chase each other, like do a quick lunge and chase to get someone out of their territory.

Tom Christopher

One rule of thumb I’ve been taught about telling if there are rabbits in your garden, even if you don’t see them, relates to their teeth, the conformation of their teeth. That if you see a stem that’s ragged, that’s been torn off, that’s more likely a deer, because they don’t have teeth that meet and snip things off. And if something is snipped off neatly, then it’s more possibly a rabbit. Although I assume there are other creatures, probably, I don’t know about woodchucks for instance.

Amy Free

Are woodchucks rodents? They are, right? Yeah. So there’s a difference there, which means they have a different tooth configuration.

Tom Christopher

But that if you get a neat little snip, it’s more likely a rabbit.

Amy Free

Definitely. Yes, that is the telltale sign. Exactly. And to the point about rodents versus lagomorphs, which rabbits are in the family of, rodents often use their hands or their paws to hold food. Rabbits do not. Rabbits are not manipulators with their front legs or their paws. And so they do do that head tilt, snip, making a nice clean 45-degree angle on that cut.

Tom Christopher

Rabbits also sample plants that they’re not familiar with.

Amy Free

They sure do, especially the young ones. So around six, seven, eight weeks of age, the mother cottontail will push those litter of kits out of the nest to start getting their independence. And at that age, a lot of fun things happen because of course they’re learning. They’re like little kids. They need to learn and explore their new environment. They will do a lot of taste testing. So if you have a plant that’s in the middle of not much around it, but kind of an isolated plant and it gets snipped off, but not eaten, that was probably a taste test, especially if you have a young rabbit in the area versus if you have a very dense planting and you see something snipped off, but not eaten, that’s probably making a path or making a place to their resting area.

Tom Christopher

There’s a lot of promotion of plants that they call deer resistant, meaning plants that supposedly deer don’t want to eat. Although that changes from area to area and also with how dense the population of deer is and how difficult they are experiencing it to find enough food. But there are also plants that are promoted as rabbit resistant. In your experience, does that generally hold up or is that just a suggestion?

Amy Free

I’d call it a suggestion. And I think that the comparison to the labels that say deer resistant is very apropos because it all depends. Like I was mentioning earlier, rabbits have taste preferences. They also want variety. I have a list from when we first moved here and I started gardening that I had printed, which is five pages long of species of plants that rabbits frequently ate is how it is labeled. And over the years I’ve taken notes on the yes and no. I have seen everything. I have seen rabbits eat milkweed, mature milkweed, not even young tender shoots, but I have seen a female cottontail eat mature milkweed, common milkweed. And there are reports that in the Southwest that the black tail hare, the desert hare also has been observed eating milkweed. So, you would think that’s kind of odd, right? It’s a toxic plant, but they do. Another case is allium. I have seen rabbits in desperation eat allium, which is shocking to me. I can’t imagine ever presenting my house rabbits with any kind of onion or garlic and them wanting to dig in. I think they would run away, but in desperate times they’ll eat anything. What has been really interesting for me is noticing what is safe in the yard versus what is safe in my house with my fur kids. So, I have a mint patch. It has peppermint, spearmint, and lemon balm in it. I also grow basil.  also grow anise hyssop. The rabbits touch none of that outside. None of it. Never have. Yet my fur kids, my two indoor rabbits love all of those things. So, I think taste preference is always a consideration. And if you are in any doubt, might a rabbit want to eat this? Go ahead and protect it and then let it mature. Let it build up some of those natural plant defenses and then maybe you’ll be okay.

Tom Christopher

So, fences, solid welded wire fences with the bottoms buried in the ground have been my go-to method for coexisting with rabbits in the garden. But you suggested some other things that can be helpful without the visual obstacle. Cause there are times when my garden starts to look like the set for Cool Hand Luke and that’s not good. But you’ve said that there are such things as you called them intentional paths and decoy gardens.

Amy Free

So yes. So ,barriers are one way to protect your plants. I also again, going back to that taste and experimentation and wanting a variety of foods. I’m a big fan of a decoy garden and it can be something cheap. Just you find an area of your space. You go to the end of season seed bin. You find just some cheap mesclun mix, lettuce mix, what have you. It could even be a 49-cent packet of seed. It doesn’t matter the quality and go ahead and start that in your yard to then be a place that rabbits are welcome because if there’s more for them to eat out in their world, they’ll leave your intentional plants alone that much more.

Another thing to think about what is growing in your yard being non-toxic. We don’t use any lawn chemicals here. We have plenty of clover. We have lots of dandelions. I don’t find them to be unsightly. The rabbits also find them delicious. So to me, it’s a win-win.

Tom Christopher

So what is the intentional path?

Amy Free

The intentional path is if you don’t want those things chewed down for that access and that place to rest. For example, in my yard what I’ve done is I have some small rocks that I intentionally place where I know I am not going to plant there.

And as the other plants I have put in mature and they make that kind of canopy, there’s an understory path along those rocks. So, the rabbits know they have an escape route. They don’t have to chew anything down to make that access happen.

Tom Christopher

Well, you know, this should not be such a surprise to me because I’m accustomed to doing similar kinds of things for other sorts of wildlife. And why not rabbits? They’re interesting. They’re beautiful. And they play an essential role in the local ecosystem. But I want to close with a plea that I couldn’t have imagined making earlier in my gardening career. And that’s a plea for rabbit conservation. There are, I think, 13 species of rabbits and hares, which are native to the United States and not all of them are flourishing. That’s largely because of habitat loss. Several species are actually in trouble. The New England Cottontail rabbit, which was once common in my part of the country, has experienced a plunge in numbers because of habitat loss and also competition from Eastern cottontails, which hunters introduced through much of the New England cottontails range so that they would have more abundant prey for hunting. My wife and I worked with the state of Massachusetts to clear cut a couple of areas within our forest to provide better habitat as it regrew for New England Cottontails. So that’s worth knowing, but there are also other species like the Pygmy Rabbits, which sounds fascinating. It’s the smallest species of rabbit and it inhabits the sagebrush west and it weighs no more than a pound at maturity. You can hold this little rabbit in your hand. They just sound wonderful. And they at this point survive in just three principal populations. And again, that’s thanks to habitat destruction, I think primarily cattle grazing. So I’m going to urge my listeners to follow your example and take a greater interest in rabbits.

Amy Free

Fantastic. Yes. And we’re seeing those changes, like you said, habitat loss. We’re seeing also some spread of diseases that previously were not here in North America. One being rabbit hemorrhagic disease virus two, which is a horrible disease that both domestic and our wild rabbits can be sick from and die very quickly. Fortunately, the spread has been somewhat controlled in the U.S.

And then climate change too. I preface everything that I talk about in my garden is here in the Midwest in a zone five, six area, but North here in Wisconsin, the Snowshoe Hare habitat is changing due to the changing climate. And so we’re seeing snowshoe hare populations reduce and move further and further North. Their white coats for winter are a real downer for their existence when the snow cover is not happening the way it used to be as they evolved.

Tom Christopher

In closing, I want to ask you for a gardening tip. My partners in this podcast, The Perfect Earth Project have asked to include a gardening tip from each guest. Can you share one perhaps related to rabbits?

Amy Free

Oh my goodness. I mentioned earlier that rabbits are good for thinking and this is not directly related to the garden. We’ve talked about some tips in terms of like physical barriers. I also want to mention how rabbits are good for thinking. And so rabbits, again, they are subtle communicators and I think we have a lot to learn from them in that way. I think that the fact that life is short is really emphasized by the rabbit’s existence. And so, I appreciate that message from them as well.

To go back to your question about a great rabbit tip, here’s my best tip. There are things called rabbit cages. So, if people have a domestic rabbit, they might want to keep it in a cage, which I strongly encourage folks not to do. Rabbits do not want to live in a cage the same as none of you want to live in a phone booth, right? I go to thrift stores and I find what were rabbit or small dog cages, flip them over, use some tools, some handy tools to take off what would have been the roof of that cage. You flip it back. The floor is now the ceiling.

Those wires are often across the top, the perfect dimension for being plant supports. I use this for my zinnias every year. I use it for ranunculus every year. You can also use it for your veggies. Don’t cage the rabbit, cage the plants. The plants have nowhere to go. They’re not moving, right? So to protect them from anything, digging or eating them, we put the plants in the cage and then they have that natural support to also grow up right in there. And by mid-summer, you don’t even see the cage. It’s completely grown around and it’s just beautiful and it’s there.

Tom Christopher

Great. Thank you very much.

Amy Free

Thanks so much, Tom. This has been wonderful.

Tom Christopher

That brings us to the end of this week’s Growing Greener. Please join us again at the same time next week on this radio station, WESU 88.1 FM for another episode, or listen to Growing Greener as a podcast at www.thomaschristophergardens.com. If you have comments or suggestions, please share them with me, Tom Christopher, via the same website, www.thomaschristophergardens.com. Growing Greener is produced as a community service in partnership with the Perfect Earth Project, a nonprofit dedicated to educating, engaging, and inspiring individuals, land care professionals and decision makers to adopt toxic-free, nature-based, and climate-responsible landscaping practices.

 Transcribed by TurboScribe.

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