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Why not eat them? We're not burning cows for fuel are we. Eating the bunnies instead of other meat would save more energy than burning them.
People probably don't want to eat rabbit instead of other meat.
Really? Rabbit’s tasty. Hare’s nicer though if you can find it.
Very possibly. However it's more a question of demand rather than taste. The rabbit eating cohort is probably already satisfied.
Two McRabbit and fries, to go please
People do eat rabbit. and it's delicious, though it's a pain to deal with all those little bones.
They might if they tried it! It's quite like poultry, the flavour is not at all challenging to anyone that eats chicken.

It was once common to eat them in Sydney; in fact my dad tells of a rabbit man that would sell them door-to-door when he was growing up. It was so common that they named the Rugby League team in the area after the tasty critters (the South Sydney Rabbitohs).

There are people who would, because they sell it. I like rabbit(s), but it's quite hard to find.
I imagine it's not worth the cost. There isn't that much meat to be had and the bodies would have to be processed quickly or kept alive to prevent spoilage. The agency in charge of all of this probably lacks the equipment to do any of this, assuming it would be cost beneficial to do it in the first place.
This is the problem that hunting solves. Issue licenses to allow people who enjoy the sport and like to eat small game to go out and harvest some number of animals. You get the population reduction, and the people who enjoy it get to eat wild game. You control the amount of animals harvested by the number of licenses issued (and some expenses for enforcement, but there are people willing to do that job for not much pay).

Seems more sensible than rounding the animals up en-masse and dumping them in an incinerator.

Except that these particular bunnies are culled from parks in Stockholm - probably not the sort of place that game hunters would like to go, nor somewhere that people using the parks would like to come across hunters doing their thing.
There isn't much meat to be had from chickens either. I'm sure there are butchers who wouldn't mind free rabbits, because now they pay for them.
Eat little fluffy bunnies? Come on now, we're not barbarians!
This was my sister's take when my Dad would prepare the rabbits he hunted for dinner. Some how, she had no problem eating an ugly old cow (or deer, for that matter).

Just further demonstrates the benefits of being cute.

Public health. The authorities don't have any control on what the bunnies ate and what diseases they may have contracted.
Hmm that could be a reason. Is there realistic danger?
Not really. Given that people safely eat wild rabbits all the time. And there is certainly no control over what they eat...
In Texas, we'd call that an annual cook-off.
Other dead animals in Sweden are also used as biofuel so adding a few thousand rabbits to the process is probably really simple.

For example:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1237009/Fu...

But were the rabbits dead? Or were they killed? There's a difference between bunny-recycling and bunny-mass-murder :-D
It's a good question, but it makes me go :-(
They were killed but they were going to be culled anyway. It makes sense to do something with the dead bodies other than burying them.
Sure. I was being facetious. 1000s of humans die everyday of preventable disease. There are greater tragedies on my book than 3,000 wild rabbits in a crematorium...
This is the third day in a row that I've visited Hacker News and the top story has basically been a fluff story with next to nothing to do with technology or startups.

Find me an article in Nature about how animal mass burns and can be used as a fuel source and I'll let it pass. This one has virtually all information in the article contained in its silly title. Please don't submit this junk here.

If everyone who up-voted your comment also flagged the post...
Unfortunately, posts are not automatically killed by flagging if they already have more than 10 points.
Perhaps it's time for another Erlang-nuke.