While the Year of the Rabbit began in earnest today, the Easter Bunny looks worried.
It has as much reason to fear extinction as the Playboy Bunny, or the late great Robert der Große, the former World's Largest Rabbit who met an horrific fate in Pyongyang in 2007.
Hasenmeister Szmolinsky holds Robert der Große
A hare-raising Prussian philanthropist sent the great beast East as an act of public diplomacy, in hope its gargantuan offspring would help end North Korea's chronic state of famine, for besides thriving on a diet of roots and cabbage trimmings, Prussian Giant Greys like Robert der Große by definition breed like rabbits.
Unfortunately, Herr Szmolinsky's 20-kilogram überbunny landed on the eve of Kim Jong-il's birthday party, and before it could reach sanctuary in the People's Petting Zoo, the jet-lagged Brandenburg lagomorph was spotted and spirited away by a cadre of the Great Comrade's ever vigilant culinary talent scouts.
The shocking act of lepicide that followed left the world's largest rabbit outside of the world's largest rabbit skin, and inside of the largest wok in Pyongyang, en route to its gala diplomatic debut at Dear Leader Jung-il's birthday banquet, in the company of iced Uzbek malossal caviar, braised Russian bear paws, and a savory hippo hot-pot donated by President Kuanda of Zambia.
Kim got the caviar, his staff got the salad bar
When Der Spiegel broke the news of Robert's death by diplomatic misadventure, the Berlin Embassy of the People's Democratic Hermit Kingdom issued a communique, catagorically denying that its Guiding Sun Ray & Invincible and Ever-Triumphant General of The Culture Wars was a bunny cancelling Right-Deviationist Hasenpfeffer fiend.
Blame fell instead on Kim's personal chef. After a long struggle session, the dotard running dog of the imperialist provocateurs denounced their conspiracy to spread fake news of a DPRK dog-meat shortage, by forcing him to transform Robert der Grosse and a pumpkin into a supersized stir-fry in order to bump roast Chow with Chow Chow pickles off the menu.
Off the menu until The Year Of The Dog
Herr Szmolinsky told Der Spiegel he was not amused.
"Korea won't be getting any more rabbits from me, they needn't bother asking."
Hearing of the widow der Große's bereavement, President Bush gallantly adopted her as his climate anxiety support animal
Absent Pyongyang's perfidious orgy of lagomorphagy, Robert and some winsome Manchurian MegaMopsey might have founded a dynasty fit to add North Korea to the roster of OPEC, the Organization of Protein-Exporting Countries.
Some Greens hope to see that dream's resurrection, for while giant rabbits are fodder-intensive, biofuel plants spew rabbit roughage by the megaton, which bids fair to make Lapin en civet à l'ancienne a dish more sustainable than Beyond Burger.
Others view the demise of the greatest living Easter Bunny as providential. If, instead of stir-frying it beyond repair, Kim Jong Il's minions had sequenced Robert der Große's DNA, the discovery of the giant rabbit's growth hormone sequence could have unleashed a climate-changing horde of CRISPR fortified Frankenbunnies onto the Asian Steppes.
Since sheep-sized arctic hares could lighten Siberia as surely as Australia and New Zealand have been brightened by lambs with fleeces white as snow, there is a clear and present danger that the albedo fallout from the detonation of a GMO snow hare population bomb could reverse global warming by offsetting the loss of heat-reflecting Arctic snow, and ussher in a new ice age
To avoid the frozen hell of a cottontail-catalyzed Snowball Earth, President Biden should summon Kim Jong-un to today's egg rolling gala to warn him of the risk of unleashing the White House Behavioral Science Initiative across the 38th Parallel, for beyond its dystopian efforts to make voters sheepish, WHBSI could inflict bunny behavioral repertoire changes to stand the thumping albedo footprint of white rabbits on its head:
