Today is World Rabbit Day and, of course, a note is in order, though you don't find them in the wild in India.

My introduction to rabbits was through, well, Enid Blyton; I grew up (now, did I ever?) on her stories of Brer Rabbit, and that old red hardbound book, thumbed dozens of times by a dreamy kid and his patient mum, has pride of place in the bookshelf in the study.

I even had a rabbit given to me as a birthday gift as a result – he was a beautiful white, with shiny pink tender eyes – but, I must say, he was boring as hell and not anything as smart as Brer Rabbit was and he didn’t smell that good (you can’t eat cabbage leaves all day and smell of roses – old jungle saying), so I sort of lost interest until he went missing one day from his cage by the veggie garden.

And when in my teens, I read an eerie story called ‘The Rabbit’s Paw’ (read it at your peril), but it only enhanced my fascination for the family of Lagomorphs to which hares, rabbits and that other marvellous chap, the pika, belong (once shared a lodging with a pika at Bedni Bugyal up in the hills in Uttarakhand and he loved my food, a matter on which he and I had a serious disagreement).

And you should know that rabbits were used in cosmetic testing for years: with their heads held tightly in brackets, for example, drops of shampoo were put into their eyes that must have been terrifyingly painful, setting new standards in needless cruelty. Beginning in the 1980s, a no-testing-on-animals movement began and some, including the passionately heretical Anita Roddick of The Body Shop - a hero of mine -, gave it strength. Better still, it became a marketing weapon and (hopefully) the cosmetic folks walk their talk today, so things have changed for the better overall (so be an optimist. If you are wondering who that is, an optimist is one who expects all the crayons to be in the box).

So, for rabbits at least, the world is probably a better place today.  And that is more than we can say for most others.