North Korea hungry for big rabbits

EBERSWALDE, Germany — Few people raise bigger rabbits than Karl Szmolinsky, who has produced long-eared whoppers since 1964. His favorite breed, German gray giants, are the size of a full-grown beagle and so fat they can barely hop.

Last year, after the retired chauffeur entered some of his monsters in an agricultural fair, word of his breeding skills spread to the North Korean Embassy in Berlin. Diplomats looked past the cute, furry faces with the twitching noses and saw a possible solution to their nation's endemic food shortage: an enormous bunny in every Korean pot.

The North Koreans approached Szmolinsky, 67, in November and asked whether he'd advise them on how to start a rabbit-breeding program to help "feed the population," the pensioner recalled at his home in Eberswalde, an eastern German town a few miles from the Polish border. Sympathetic to the Koreans' plight, he agreed to sell some of his best stock at a steep discount and volunteered to travel to the hermetic nation as a consultant.

"They liked what they saw, and they liked how big they were," he said, as he showed off other bunnies that he raises in weathered hutches in his back yard. "It's harder than you think to raise them. They need a varied diet, but they have to be fed like pigs, basically, to get that big."

In December, Szmolinsky stuffed six of his rabbits into modified dog carriers and took them to Berlin, where they were put on a flight for Pyongyang, via Frankfurt, Germany, and Beijing. Robert, a 23-pounder, was the largest of the bunch, which included four female rabbits and one other male carefully selected for their breeding potential.

How, exactly, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea intends to parlay the small herd of German rabbits into hunger relief for its 23 million citizens is unclear.

In the hands of a skilled butcher, a German gray giant can yield up to 15 pounds of meat, according to Szmolinsky. "There's not much fat, and it's very tender."

The Koreans' choice of rabbits has other German breeders scratching their heads.

Karl-Heinz Heitz, chairman of the State Association of Rabbit Breeders in Berlin-Brandenburg, said that German gray giants are hard to beat for size but that they aren't cheap to fatten up. It takes wheelbarrow-loads of hay, vegetables and rabbit chow to bring them to maturity.