They can, in fact, safely return the rabbit to the stew pot.

They're food. Rabbits. People eat them.

It's not better for the rabbit to be turned loose to be mauled to death by a housecat or eaten by a coyote. A shelter is going to euthanize, wasting good meat.

This is squeamishness masquerading as morality.

That's not the point. I have literally nothing against eating rabbits - they are delicious in fact.

I do hover, object to lying. Like OP said - they(everyone in fact) have the right to make an informed choice. By omitting this information, people who are returning a rabbit aren't making an informed choice. It's a trick, a ruse, if money was involved I'd call it a fraud.

Nothing to do with squeamishness.

They're returning the rabbits to the previous owners. There's no further expectation of duty to either party.

The situation implies that the person selling the rabbits as pets would attempt to rehome them or care for them as pets.

There's a difference between being technically correct, and being moral. While the language used is technically correct for the situation, omitting the information about where the rabbits end up is immoral.

Clearly OP understands that if the whole truth was told, they wouldn't be getting a free source of rabbit meat...

Is it dishonest to buy a rabbit and not mention that you're planning to eat/breed/keep it as a pet?

No of course not, it's none of the seller's business. If they say "hey we're vegan please don't eat our rabbits" that's a different matter, it would be at the very least polite to respect those wishes.

Why on Earth would returning a rabbit to a farm where they eat them be any different? In this case the possibility is perfectly clear.

I think the bit about it being a "farm where they eat them" is the key point.

If the person returning it knows that, then sure. The OP implied pretty heavily that they don't know the ultimate fate of the rabbits.

As far as these people know its "A farm where they sell breed and sell rabbits as pets", not a farm that raises them for meat.

"it's none of the seller's business"

In this case, the parties are close relatives, so I would argue that their threshold of duty to disclose such facts is somewhat higher than in case of complete strangers.

I would hardly call it immoral. If the owners are curious about the ultimate fate of the rabbit, they could simply ask before returning.

I think it doesn't occur to them that the rabbit's new home is in the oven. They wouldn't think about asking

I think the expectation is that since they bought the rabbit there and the rabbit was happily living there, when they return it, they expect it to still live. They think they are returning the rabbit to its "natural" environment and will happily live on the farm.

So there is no legal duty or obligation, but morally, the expectation on both parties are definitely not the same. Otherwise they would tell them that they would cook them when they return them. The fact they are hiding this information shows that expectations are not aligned.

Yeah but it's a farm... it's not a rabbit rescue and pet store

Did you miss the part where the sister says "that [if] they want to let the rabbit loose, they can return it for free"?

That's an outright lie, since they aren't letting the rabbit loose to live on the farm -- they're eating it.

what matters is not what we think. What matters is what the girl recovering the rabbits thinks. If she thinks that if she told the truth the rabbits wouldn't be returned to her, then by not saying anything, she is lying by omission.

The part which seems relevant is if the parents (or a random person) had the information that the rabbit would be made into stew, then that would likely change their decision to return the rabbit.

Are dogs food?

I was in Northern Vietnam in 2019, happily riding my rental scooter around.

I ride right past a dog on a rotisserie.

I stopped to talk to the guy and he showed me his sign that said Dog Meat. After learning the words for dog meat in Vietnamese, I saw the signs everywhere.

I've had dogs as pets for decades. I don't see why people cant eat them if they want to. I wouldn't eat my dog because of emotional attachments, but that doesn't mean that others who don't have emotional ties cant eat them.

But perhaps you can see why someone would be upset if you needed to pass your dog to someone else's care; and they ate them.

Are pigs food to Muslims?

Is there a culture where eating rabbit is taboo?

You said

> They're food. Rabbits. People eat them.

Well people eat dogs and pigs so then by the same logic they are food.

What is with all your edgelord stuff with rabbits. You need to work out some of your issues

Letting them free will likely get them eaten anyway, probably less humanly since they’ll still be alive while they are eaten. Or run over. These are domesticated rabbits, not wild ones.

What the parent post means is that the owners might not have let the rabbit free bit would find an other alternative, like keeping the rabbit anyway because they love it, giving the rabbit to a friend etc. But now they think their is this great alternative of giving the rabbit back but unknowingly killing it.

I’ve had several friends have rabbits in my lifetime. They all t eventually let them go instead of finding a new home. Each time I looked at them in horror while I imagined the lucky hawk having dinner.

Most people think rabbits are “natural” when they may actually be invasive. So they let them go. Finding a new home is the last thing on every one of these owners mind.

I could never imagine doing this to an animal I care about. This is sociopathic behaviour. Unless they believe the rabbit will survive, in which it's just wildly ignorant. And therefore irresponsible, because a rabbit owner should have a rough understanding of what a rabbit is and how they work.

It is quite sad and irresponsible, but extremely common.

There was a case here in Norway a few years back. A litter of dead kittens was found in the woods, wrapped in several layers of plastic bags. Inner layers had scratches proving the kittens were alive and not stillborn.

Hongkong has a _modest_ social problem related to freeing unwanted pets into the wild. There are numerous billboards and buses adverts warning people not to do it.

On the other hand, there is very real urban legend of a salt water crocodile that was captured in early 2000s in the Hongkong wild. It was hunted for months. Authorities have no idea if was a release, or travelled from nearby (more tropical) region. Read more about Pui Pui on Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pui_Pui_(crocodile) She is even on show at the Hongkong Wetland Park. But if you want to see salties in the wild without too much effort or stress, you can do that in Singapore at a wetland reserve near Kranji.

These are two contradictory reasons. Rabbits are considered invasive because there is a non-zero chance they will escape the hawk and reproduce.

It's not contradictory in the slightest, the odds of a domesticated and domestic rabbit surviving predation are effectively nil.

The odds that it manages a litter first are higher, especially if it escapes pregnant, which rabbits generally are if they're able to be. Those pups are feral, not domestic, and have moderately better odds. Given enough generations, the domesticated neoteny is selected out by predation and now you have an invasive population of feral rabbits which can survive in the wild.

Everyone dies eventually.

Yes, but not of predation. The number of rabbits which die of age or starvation in their burrows over the winter, or disease, is not zero.

My experience is that you don't let a rabbit go... you just stop trying to track the little lagomorph down after it chews through or digs under the fence for the third time.

Rabbits are good as prey, great as pests, bad as pets.

Would you rather be released from prison into a dangerous world or executed?

These are not wild rabbits.

You cannot release them into the wild, just like you can’t release penguins from the zoo into the wild. We spend most of our adult life teaching our children how to survive. Most people don’t teach their pets how to survive.

No offense, but your question makes no sense in the scope we are dealing with. But fwiw, most people released from prison don’t do so well with reintegration. Some don’t survive, some end up going back, and very few thrive.

People aren’t domesticated rabbits.

Rabbits are incredibly destructive of many environments. Have a look at New Zealand.

Then don't breed them, sell them as pets, then lie to parents and kill and eat them. Seems like an easy solution..

This is how I’ve always behaved, yet the problem remains.

Australia would like to have a word with you.

The whole thing was an Invisible initiation, there was never any rabbit.

There is no lie, only assumptions on their part.