The Easter Bilby

I got my first Easter chocolate of the season, a gift from someone just back from Australia.

"Oh, an Easter bunny!" I say with delight. The chocolate is shaped like a bunny and wrapped in colored tinfoil.

"Not an Easter bunny. This is from Haigh's in Adelaide. The Aussies vilify rabbits. This is the Easter Bilby."

'Vilify rabbits?" I think. Cute furry creatures with large ears and fluffy tails? Gloria Steinem against the Hefner bunnies, that I understand. But slam the Easter Bunny?

From the Haigh's Chocolates website:
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"Back in the early 1990s, The Foundation for Rabbit Free Australia created the Easter Bilby. Not long after, we joined forces with them. Haigh’s stopped making chocolate bunnies and made Australia’s very first Easter Bilbies – an immediate hit with our customers.

THE BILBY’S BOUNCING BACK
Thanks to increased awareness and lots of hard work by a number of organisations and government departments, the bilby is starting to make a comeback. In South Australia, where the bilby was once extinct, there are now estimated to be over 1500 bilbies back in the wild.

SAVING THE BILBY
The bilby is a very cute little creature, native to Australia. This small burrowing bandicoot used to be found in its millions, living across 70% of our country. Sadly, over the past 200 years, settlement and clearing, plus the introduction of rabbits, foxes and feral cats, pushed this animal almost to extinction – in fact, entirely to extinction in South Australia.

HAIGH'S SUPPORT RABBIT FREE AUSTRALIA
Rabbit Free Australia is a non-profit organisation established to raise community awareness of the damage to the environment done by the wild rabbit, and find ways to get rid of all the wild rabbits in this country.

The Foundation developed and registered the Easter Bilby campaign in 1991 – partly to raise awareness of the damage done by rabbits to native wildlife, and partly to raise money from royalties of Easter Bilby to fund their work.

Two years later, Haigh’s joined forces with the Foundation, and created Australia’s very first Easter Bilby."
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Well, who knew? I'm all for nursing back the bilby but I feel a little bad for the bunny now, the black sheep of the Outback. I tell you, one chocolaty bite of this bilby, however, and I'm happy to ride both sides of the debate. I am a bandicoot/bunny fence-rider, the Norm Coleman of Easter chocolate ideology. Bilbies from Adelaide, bunnies from St. Paul. Here's hoping you find a little chocolate in your basket.