Marcus Hobson's Reviews > Raising Hare: A Memoir

Chloe Dalton has spent years as a political advisor and foreign policy specialist. She divided her time between London and a house in the country. When th Covid lockdowns forced us to retreat, she chose to live in the country. It was there on an evening walk that she discovered what appeared to be an abandoned leveret, a young hare. Her book magically charts what happened next.
Here is her first encounter:

The animal, no longer than the width of my palm, lay on its stomach with its eyes open and its short, silky ears held tightly against its back. Its fur was dark brown, thick and choppy, and grew in delicate curls along its spine. Long, pale guard hairs and whiskers stood out from its body and glowed in the weak sun, creating a corona of light around its rump and muzzle. Set against the bare earth and dry grass it was hard to tell where the fur ended and the ground began. It blended into the dead winter landscape so completely that, but for the rapid rise and fall of its flanks, I would have mistaken it for a stone. Its forepaws were pressed tightly together, fringed in fur the colour of bone and overlapping as if for comfort. Its jet black eyes were encircled with a thick, uneven band of creamy fur. High on its forehead was a distinct white mark that stood out like a minute dribble of paint. It did not stir as I came into view, but studied the ground in front of it, unmoving. Leveret.

She takes the little stranger into her home, thinking she is helping but soon discovering that to do so means it can never be returned to its mother. The smell of another on the little body means its mother will reject it and cease to feed it. Dalton faces the desperate realisation that she has done too much and tries to ask others, country dwellers with a better understanding of how such things might work, to take on the job of adoptive parents. It is soon clear that the job is hers alone.
What follows is beautiful story of watching and observing the little changes and the fast growth. And the trust that develops between wild animal and human. “I was only able to share its space because it allowed me to.”
Hoping to find out what a growing hare will eat she requests numerous books from the temporarily closed London Library. They all turn out to be a variety of ways to cook and eat a hare, nothing about feeding the, “To read these violent accounts in the leveret’s vicinity felt like a form of betrayal.”
Reaching the end of the book it is possible to see the journey that Dalton has taken as one about self-growth and self-awareness. At no point does she consider the hare as a pet and does all she can to allow it to come and go on its own terms. At times this leads to the terrifying prospect of loss. When the buzzards, foxes and owls are hunting and the hares doesn’t come home, or when the huge combine harvesters or giant ploughs are farming the landscape. One thing is certain, Dalton lives in a hare-rich part of England and is frequently able to see multiple hares in the fields around her home. That comes with a down-side when she inspects the fields in the days after harvest and ploughing and finds the bodies of multiple dead hares, frozen in fear by the approaching machinery and reduced to carrion for a variety of scavengers. Such observations allow her to question just how much we care about our environment and the creatures that live in it. For the first time she takes a real interest in the ecosystem that surrounds her little home.
From what she learns about the behaviour of the wild animal that shares her home she challenges many of the age-old myths about hares. The mad-March hare and the skittish fleeing animal are stereotypes which she rebuffs with her own close observation. What she finds is a wild animal that has very set routines and a regular time pattern. She finds that the boxing that we sometimes see as a behaviour in the wild is not between competing males, but between males and females.
At so many points Dalton challenges the conventional wisdom of what has been said and written about hares in the past, presenting us with a new better observed natural history of the hare. Her interest in the animal leads her to an interest in the plants which it needs to eat and so to the farming and conservation necessary to maintain a landscape in which a hare can survive and thrive.
This is a story about an animal which gives as much as the person to the story and leads Dalton to conclude with the following observation:

(the hare)…made me re-evaluate my life, and the question of what constitutes a good one. I have learnt to savour beautiful experiences while they last – however small and domestic they may be in scope – to find a simplicity of self. The sensation of wonder she ignited in me continues to burn, showing me that aspects of my life may be shaped or reshaped. She did not change, I did. I have not tamed the hare but, but in many ways the hare has stilled me.

Sometimes a book like this, one that makes you think harder about your own experiences, will bring to mind something of your own. A few months ago as I walked into my kitchen the was a hare just outside the glass door. It froze and remained completely still, giving me time to watch and admire. It was only the second time in my life that I had been close to a hare although I had seen them at a distance, sometimes boxing in the roadside paddocks near Waipu Cove, and as a boy in the quiet field roads of Leicestershire. I was expecting the hare outside my door to bolt when I took a pace closer to the window. Instead, it lowered itself from standing to crouching and laid its long ears flat against its back. We held each other’s gaze for a long time and I was able to study the hare. Its ears were longer than its head and there was a rim of amber around its eye. A noise in the kitchen made me turn my head for a second and in that fleeting moment the hare was gone, impossible to see in any direction. All these memories came back to me reading this delightful book. The rare chance to share a moment with a wild animal.