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Ancestor: Cuniculus langier (Wooly Rabbit)

Size: Largest species: 85 cm, Smallest species: 55 cm, from nose to hindquarters.

Dietary Needs: Lots of various grasses, herbaceous plants, roots and seasonal products like small mountain berries are consumed. They have more advanced hindgut fermentation and more evolved symbiotic bacteria to help digest their food than their domestic rabbit ancestors, reducing their reliance on coprophagy to extract all of the nutrients for their food. As a side benefit they can also digest tougher, drier, less appetizing plant material.

Life Cycle: When in a small family group, only the dominant male and females will reproduce in the warmer, sometimes wetter spring. Older offspring eventually get driven out.

If travelling as part of a herd during spring, older offspring will instead leave association with their immediate family and begin to mingle with other of-age members of their own species. Females of their ancestors used to fight over burrowing spots, this is no longer the case. Now females tend to buddy up with other females, making them the backbone of a herd's interfamily relationships. A side effect of this is that females have reduced overall competitiveness and aggressiveness. Their instincts concern them most with safety, which they get from being in a crowd.

Most competitive behaviour comes in the form of male-against-male. There are technically enough females for all males, but competitive males, in dominating weaker males, have access to more females and produce more offspring this way, as well as deny weaker males access to those females. The effect of this is stronger males that become very hormonal and combative in the spring. They fight by biting, scratching, kicking and wrestling.

The male has no real involvement in his offspring after mating, though he is likely to continue to revisit the same female for a mate.

Due to their size, they take longer to mature than their ancestors. They are also born slightly more developed. Their eyes are open at birth and they have fur. They can move around slightly, though tire quickly. Usually they will hide in the grass while their mother feeds. They very quickly build stamina and gain mobility, and are running around within a week. After this point they have six months until they reach independence from their mother, though they will likely stay with their mother until the next spring.

Other: They appear as herds and consist of several close-knit families formed in an alliance. They might break apart into their separate families if food becomes scarce or low quality. They are very nomadic and have lost their reliance on burrows, instead keeping on the move as the slopes provide limited soil and pasture, overgrazing an area is too easy to do. To keep moving ensures they won't start going hungry, and past areas can recover.

They have good balance and coordination on steep ground and rocks. They are also fast, almost gliding across difficult and dangerous terrain when motivated by a predator. They have naked (but tough) toe and paw pads for both improved traction and sensitivity. Their claws are thick and blunt, and can absorb a lot of shock.

Their fur is similar to wools seen on Earth mammals. There are many different hair types that grow to different depths, sometimes coiling around each other to increase the density of the insulation. The longest hair type erupts to the outer surface and flows in such a way that they guide accumulating water droplets down the side of the rabbit and onto the ground around it, instead of soaking into the fur. The winter wool is thickest in species on the far Southern point of the mountain range, slightly closer to the South pole where seasonal changes are greater. This species wool is shed in spring and summer. At the Northern point there is less seasonal change but the weather is drier and less cloudy, meaning more extreme day and night change. Species there tend to have a more moderate, year-round coat.

Before domestic rabbits had been introduced to the planet, many of their external and internal parasites had been handled and exterminated. This is why Planet Cat Santuary has so few parasites for the introduced animals, including cats. But in this particular case, a domestic-transmitting strain of the Shope papilloma virus (SPV) survived the antivirals (and it is not the only virus to do so). SPV manifests macroscopically as tumorous, horn-like growths anywhere on the exterior of the rabbit's body. This was nearly always to the rabbit's detriment. But over time the rabbits evolved immunity to this virus. But not total, complete immunity. In the case of males, immunity is suppressed on the upper head and neck area. The horns gave competing males an advantage in the form of a weapon. It could be the deciding factor in the case of a male with a horn versus one without. In addition, the horn's growth is assisted by the rabbit's body, resulting in a straighter, more fixed and more robust horn.

Utilizing this horn isn't a strong innate instinct, but a combination of discovery and instinct. They have to realise that they have a horn and have the intelligence or observational insight to know how to use it, to succeed with it. More intelligent individuals might figure it out without strong instincts, while less intelligent individuals with weak horn-using instincts may only find the horn a hinderance.

In addition, not all horns are equal. Some horns grow high on the head, fixed well in place and are hard like the wood of a tree. As thousands of years pass by rabbits that produce these horns are becoming more common. However some rabbits have suppressed immunity in the wrong places where a horn is just a detriment, while others produce poor quality horns. For a horn to help a male succeed a lot of factors must come together, making it a genetic gamble. Survival at least is more assured being a male with full body immunity to SPV and almost no chance of horn growth. This is why the horned trait has not exploded across the population, but continues to persist as a valid strategy.