In one episode of the television
Cartoon series,
The Looney Toons,
Bugs Bunny wonders whether a floundering, half-drowning
Daffy Duck will remember that, being a duck, he can swim. Later in the same episode, Bugs wonders whether a long-distance-falling Daffy will remember that he can fly. Bugs Bunny, naturally, can do neither. Though Bugs is the cooler character in the cartoon world (just as
Mickey Mouse trumps
Donald Duck in that tooniverse), in reality,
ducks are better than
rabbits, for many reasons.
Flight
Ducks can fly. I mean, I've seen some rabbits jump pretty high, but
ducks can fly!! Sometimes for hundreds of miles without setting down. By comparison, rabbits can, well, they can dig holes in the ground. What would you rather be able to do, dig holes under the
Earth at a slightly better than average pace, or soar above it-- and all the obstacles of the ground-- faster than any man can run? Over the course of their lives, rabbits rarely travel more than a mile from the place of their birth. And while it's true that ducks can be homey for spells at a time, they naetheless get out there and take in broad stretches of geography from view not experienced at all in the mammalian realm. Ducks can see the world-- or, at the least, a respectable corridor of it-- and because of this ability, far flung places like
Hawaii and the
Galapagos have their own native duck
species, havig never seen a rabbit until
Man introduced them.
Swimming
Diving into that other element of travel, as
Jimmy Carter once learned,
rabbits can indeed swim, and it can be a fright to behold. But rabbits aren't made for swimming, and venture into the water only slowly and clumsily, while ducks can float serenely on, or dive to the bottom and pop back up in a trice. Think about it in elemental terms. Ducks beat rabbits in air and water; rabbits only in the earth. And (since neither is a master of
fire),
two out of three ain't bad.
Color
This is an aspect I gather hasn't been much plumbed, since the duck/rabbit
debate typically revolves around things like 'cuteness' and 'strokeability.' But what
color are rabbits?
Black,
white,
grey, shades of
tan and
brown, or some
medley of these. Oh, there are ducks which come in all these colors as well, but ducks appear in every other color known as well.
Blues and
greens,
orange,
yellow,
purple,
teal. And in more than a few they seem to shimmer with a rainbow coalescence. Another point to the ducks!
Pestiness
Any
crop gardener will tell you, rabbits are goddamned irritating
pests. They get in everything and destroy it in their
greed for tender nibblings, and stopping them will take a fence going several feet above and below the ground. And let us recall that rabbits are
lagomorphs, a classification just this close to
rodents; they are inclined with some frequency to breed beyond the long-term capacity of their environment to support them, resulting in a scourge of rabbits engaging in a mad dash to consume all available resources before starvation begins to pile up rabbit corpses. Ducks, on the other hand, are much less pesky (
aside from those Menlo Park beasties who've become so acclimated to the human presence that they'll try to run up and snatch food right out of your hand). Have you ever heard of somebody erecting a duck-proof fence?
Well, I could go on and on and on and on and on, but the point is made. Ducks > rabbits.