Could my dog have eaten bunnies?

I have a 5 year old Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever. She is very
passive, even to much smaller dogs.

This morning she dug out a nest of new born bunnies. She was running around
them, barking and pawing at them. My wife (inexplicably) put them back in
the nest and brought the dog in, and let her out a few hours later. When my
wife went out, she saw the nest was dug up again and the bunnies were gone;
just some fur.

EastneyEnder...

.....

Since she didn't hurt them the first time, my wife (inexplicably) thought it
would be okay. And of course, tollers aren't supposed eat animals; they are
just supposed to retrieve them.

So, do you think she ate them? I don't know what else could have happened

Alison...

Rabbits often move or kill their babies if their nest is disturbed. They
use their own fur to make a nest.

EastneyEnder...

Aliison, that would apply to the European wild rabbit only - Oryctolagus
cuniculus which isn't native in North America. Wild rabbits in the USA are a
different species more closely related to hares.... the Eastern Cottontail
doesn't dig burrows or pluck fur for a nest, even though it looks very much
like our Europeans.

Rabbits & hares are one of the very few smaller animals which cannot pick up
their babies to move them, so once a nest is disturbed the mother usually
abandons them.

So, sadly if you found no babies and some fur, it doesn't look like the
babies made it. There are plenty of other predators which could have found
them; it didn't have to have been your dog. Among others, mink, foxes, owls,
hawks, crows, snakes, cats and even rats prey on baby rabbits.

Kathleen...

Ummm. Nope.

We've had several nests of cottontails in our yard and while they don't
dig nests into the earth, they certainly do pack down a depression in
tall grass, line it with fur and cover it over with dried grass.

One nest was discovered while mowing the lawn. One of the babies was
mortally wounded, and fearful that the mother would abandon the rest, I
took them into the house and called rabbit rescue. They told me to put
them back in the fur-lined depression where I'd found them, and cover
them back over with as much of the fur and grass lid as I could locate.
I was told to take a couple of brightly colored threads and lay them
in the shape of an X over the cover of the nest, and to come back in the
morning and see if the X was messed up. If so, the mother had returned
to nurse and all was well.

Sure enough, the X had been scratch out of position, so for the next
couple of weeks I carefully mowed a wide path around the nest's
location. Eventually the three surviving bunnies were seen hopping
around the yard, then they either moved on or were eaten by the
neighbor's cat.

Alison

to them, but we do have coyotes in the area...