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.