Hare It Is: the Eyes of the Future are Here Today

We've seen this before, back in the '70s. Rabbits stormed across the countryside, making it hell for the people who happened to live there. It took a hell of a lot of effort to contain those big furry beasties, and I'm sure that sound-thinking people everywhere don't want a repeat of that hellish performance (no matter how hellishly bad that movie really was).

Not sure this technology would lead to that sort of thing, but you never know, especially with our big-eared furry friends.

Actually, if it's rabbits on the loose, I'd much prefer ones like Harvey or even that giant wooden one in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, since that one caused only one fatality in the end. Mind you, the Rabbit of Caerbannog (the one with "big, pointy teeth") was a different matter entirely, but that's beside the point, really, isn't it?)

Anyway, back to the future — or the present, as the case may be — because a group of well-meaning scientists have actually gone and strapped small-pixel displays onto the eyes of rabbits to see if the poor little bunnies could survive the experience. (How would you like it if a group of people in white coats strapped you down and pasted a tiny camera onto your irises? Wouldn't feel too good, now would it?

Or would it? Maybe it would. Maybe it did. After all, we don't have the tapes of what the rabbits said after this was all over. They might have enjoyed it. And the things they might have seen!

They probably didn't see much more out of the ordinary than lights, actually, since the device wasn't large enough to show important things like letters and numbers. That comes later, in the human-sized version, which the scientists swear will be used for nothing so much as monitoring for glaucoma. 

Yeah, right. Anyway, I'm sure that we're years away from any sort of "rabbits rampaging round the countryside" scenes on TV, unless the Lepus return. As for when those scientists get around to making good on their promise to test this sort of thing on humans? Well, we shall wee whether we have time to prepare for the day when someone says, "I'll be back" — and means it.