RAISING HARE by CHLOE DALTON, Reviewed in Biblio, October 2025
On an icy February morning during the pandemic, Chloe Dalton pulled on coat, boots and gloves, and set off for a walk – without an inkling that her entire way of being was about to be transformed. As she strolled through the fields around her home, a restored barn in the English countryside, she came to an abrupt halt: there was a tiny creature, smaller than her palm, sheltering on the ribbon of grass that ran down the centre of the rutted track. A leveret. “The word surfaced in my mind, even though I had never seen a baby hare before”. She left it there, not wishing to interfere, but when she saw it immobile in the same spot four hours later, she knew she could not abandon it to die.
Published last year to great acclaim, Raising Hare shows how caring for an animal can unmake and remake us. In ‘Auguries of Innocence’, William Blake, seeing the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wildflower, swears energetically at the cruelties humans do to blameless animals: “Each outcry of the hunted hare/A fibre from the brain does tear”. Caring for the leveret makes Dalton intensely aware of such violence too, and of the natural world, and her own ignorance about it. The leveret becomes her grain of sand.
Where I live, if we drive out at dusk there are often hares in our headlights – leaping gracefully away into the brush. They are one of the many wild animals, small and large, that we see in Himalayan forests where the leopard corners all the attention. I knew nothing about hares and gave them little thought – until this compelling book came my way.
Dalton’s childhood holidays were rural, but later as a foreign policy advisor, she was in her element in cities, hotels, airports; her adrenaline rush came from travel to places like Bamako or Sarajevo. During the pandemic, she sheltered in the countryside, more involved in her work than her surroundings. Once she found the leveret everything changed as, over time, she came to understand how incomparable a feeling it is to gain an animal’s trust. In passages that have a lyrical, loving glow about them, she describes the leveret from its infancy to its maturity when it gives birth to its own litters. Through this cycle, Dalton records their life together with infinite gentleness and adoration, in the way she relates to the leveret itself: “I felt a new spirit of attentiveness to nature, no less wonderful for being entirely unoriginal, for old as it is as human experience, it was new to me”.
We know it is old. From Joy Adamson’s Born Free to Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk, there have been accounts of unusual relationships between animals and humans. I was reminded of Khairi, an orphaned tiger cub found in 1974 in the Simlipal National Park, and taken in by Saroj Raj Choudhury, its first Director. Her photos must have made an indelible impression on my infant brain – a striped giant lounging with humans as if it were a pet cat, being fed by hand. Dr Choudhury and his wife Nalini did the best they could, from the knowledge and resources available to them fifty-odd years ago: they never caged her, rearing her to be wild. But despite many attempts to make her roam free, Khairi always returned.
When a biologist fails, how can a foreign policy expert hope to succeed? Consider the foundling a foreign country and do the research? Dalton is methodical, asking around for advice, scouring the internet and books because thus far her interest in nature hadn’t extended beyond wondering if it was it dry enough to walk, warm enough to eat outside. She confesses her ignorance, records the painful mistakes she makes. The only thing she is instinctively sure of is that the leveret must remain wild: she will never cage it, name it, or pet it. Throughout its life the leveret comes and goes freely, and what it does during the times it disappears remains a mystery: “But I find I do not need to know more than I already do. I am content with the small part of her life that overlaps with mine.”
However, the tiny and helpless creature does require nourishment and Dalton begins bottle-feeding it lactose-free milk. “Wrapped in the dust cloth, the leveret would close its eyes, its jaws working slowly, sometimes appearing to fall asleep mid-feed. It would nestle against my heart, in the palm of my hand, long after it had finished.” In the books she turns to for help she finds “countless descriptions of how to hunt, kill or cook a hare, but not a word on how to raise them.” Her unlikely mentor is the poet William Cowper, who kept three pet hares, and in a 1774 poem wrote, “His diet was of wheaten bread,/ and milk and oats and straw.” Inspired, Dalton tries out all the foods he mentions. The leveret develops a routine and she falls in with it. It shows a partiality for porridge oats, tumbles over her legs, lets her pick it up, sleeps near her and though it disappears for long hours, it always returns.
Dalton’s research findings begin to gnaw at her: that thousands of hares are shot in Britain for sport. That a dying or trapped hare will emit “a shattering cry, like a hurt child.” What had been innocuous to her before becomes menacing. One morning giant tractors arrive to harvest potatoes – to her they are a death machine. Once they’re gone, she makes herself examine the fields sick with fear that her hare has been killed. It’s gone missing for days now and as she encounters one bloodied hare corpse after another, she knows her illusions of tranquillity in the countryside have been destroyed forever.
Her hare turns out to be unharmed – a few days later, she finds it stretched out in its usual place, asleep. It is the kind of miracle I yearned for when we lost one of our dogs to a leopard. Like Dalton with her leveret, we used to let our dogs run free. We wanted them to be themselves: to linger, lounge, race around, explore. Like her, we knew what the price might be, but prayed that it would never be demanded. Cowper kept his hares caged, like pet rabbits. Of her hare Dalton writes, “she might live to old age if she were kept shut up in the house…Instead, she lives the life of a wild hare, hard-pressed, short perhaps, but free.”
The threats to wild hares are many: “I knew by now there was nothing I could do to drive the stoats from the garden, not to protect the hares from the buzzards and kestrels that keened over me in the summer skies and the fat carrion crows that would land in the garden every day.” Predators are not the greatest threat though – mechanised farming is. This makes her search the ways in which humans might live more harmoniously with nature. She plants thousands of saplings to restore hedgerows, persuades farmers to create wildflower corridors. Together they restore a dead pond, and the wildlife that had vanished inches back. She throws herself into planting a garden so that her little hare will have cover nearby, and grasses to forage.
The most tender passages occur when Dalton describes the leveret, colour by colour, limb by limb, making sweetly unexpected connections: “With only the tip of its long hind legs visible under the fringe of fur on its chest, it was the size and shape of a small loaf of brown bread.” She discovers that though hares don’t have vocal chords, her leveret makes a “strange musical call… louder than a puff, sharper than a sigh, softer than a grunt and more musical than a snort.”
Some of the finest English prose about the natural world centres on the special tenderness of interspecies connections, and there seems now to be a tradition of writers who have experienced first-hand the truth that there is no love as bewildering, fulfilling, and life-enlarging as that between a human and an animal. With this book, her first, Chloe Dalton joins that tradition triumphantly. A delicate, calm account of the bond between a hare and a woman blossoms into a story that tells us more about our devastated planet than the most frenzied lectures on the environment.