Bunny Burning

Forget bunny boiling jealous rages and rapacious butchers. The biggest threats to Peter Rabbit's Swedish cousins are the cold, the cull and their flammable cadavers.

The city of Stockholm shoots thousands of wild rabbits spread across the green spaces of the Swedish capital and sends their bodies to be burned as heating fuel, a practice which has enraged animal rights groups.

City official Mats Freij said Stockholm killed 6,000 wild rabbits last year and has culled 3,000 so far this year, but said a subcontractor decided to use the cadavers as fuel.

"Just as with us people ... the bodies contain a lot of fat and fat has exactly the same energy content as normal heating oil for instance," Konvex Chief Executive Leo Virta said.