Spain Released 9 Lynx Into Dead Land — What They Did to Rabbits Was Unbelievable

Spain Released 9 Lynx Into Dead Land — What They Did to Rabbits Was Unbelievable In 2002, biologists counted every Iberian lynx left alive on Earth. The number was ninety-four, split between two populations too far apart to ever meet. This cat depends on rabbits for nearly its entire diet, and the rabbit population was already collapsing from a disease that had no cure. So conservationists tried something risky: releasing captive-bred lynx into land that still didn't have enough rabbits to support them. What happened next didn't match any of the standard predictions. Rabbit numbers didn't drop further — they started to recover. A second disease outbreak years later nearly undid all of it. Let's look at what actually happened, and what the evidence shows.