Rabbits and Violence in Vaca Vale

If they were making a list of the many violent creatures of the world, the average person wouldn't think to include a rabbit in the rank. The average person is also unaware of how viciously aggressive a rabbit can be, nor how quick they are to tear each other apart when confined to close quarters. Someone reading Tess Gunty's The Rabbit Hutch would be shocked by the opening scene. Gunty includes an excerpt from a resident of Flint Michigan that reads: "If you don't sell them as pets, you got to get rid of them as meat...If you don't have ten separate cages for them then they start fighting. The males castrate the other males. They do. They chew their balls right off. Then you have a bloody mess." This scene foreshadows an equally gruesome and violent showcase of animalistic aggression that takes place at the end of the novel, in the small, run-down, apartment complex nicknamed the rabbit hutch. The three teenage boys that inhabit apartment C4, Tod, Malik, and Jack murder their fourth roommate, Blandine. Three boys and one girl in a small apartment seem like nothing but trouble, to begin with, but the disaster that occurs is nothing less than shocking. 

Jack and Malik urge Tod to kill Blandine's rescued pet Goat named Hildegard. Tod attempts to resist the peer pressure but eventually raises a knife for the killing blow. It's then that Blandine intervenes and begins to strangle Tod as she tries to wrestle the knife from his hand and is ultimately stabbed to death. Jack recounts the facts with the police he says, "Malik handed Todd the knife...Todd lifted the knife...[a]nd then she was there. Right there. All of a sudden. Blandine"(376). Then, " I pulled down her strap...[s]he lunged for me. I ripped her strap...Blandine reached for Todd's throat"(376). Jack says, "I tore down the top of her dress...Todd's head going purple...[h]e held the knife...[h]e put it into Blandine...[o]nce...[a]gain...[a]gain...[a]gain..." and "[t]here was blood on the floor....[t]here was blood on my feet. The blood was warm like soup...The body bled"(376).  This gruesome scene between four teenagers tapped in a shotty apartment complex is parallel to the scene Gunty includes at the beginning of the novel. Much like rabbits in a hutch, these angsty teenagers have too long been confined to their cage of an apartment. This frustration has caused them to grow violent. Gunty’s metaphorical use of Rabbits in her novel is a message to her readers that if human beings are treated like animals, they will behave like animals. If you trap four teenagers in a little apartment in the dying city of Vaca Vale, they’ll tear each other apart.