For centuries, rabbits have been used as a food commodity. And yet even today when there are millions of families keeping rabbits as domestic companions, the parallel perception of those prey animals as commodity remains equally dominant in public discourse.

In Nobody Wants to Eat Them Alive, authors Gayane Torosyan and Brian Lowe use semiotic analysis to explore the changes occurring in societal perception of rabbits as commodity animals as juxtaposed to their increasing popularity as domestic companions. The study is based on a preliminary hypothesis that rabbits are increasingly...