This is another wedge into what was at one time the rock upon which the American Culture was based. Animals are not humans, and to allow a government to require you to treat animals as humans is one more freedom stolen.
Just because a person choses to treat an animal as a family member, does not make it a family member. It is still the property of that individual. The only difference between a “domestic” rabbit raised as a pet and one raised for food is the affection the human(s) decide to give it. Being their property, they should be allowed to treat it as they wish with reasonable health considerations.
When I was a child, staying at my father’s parents farm for a few weeks, my uncle took me to a slaughterhouse, being one of the destinations on his ‘to do’ list. I was allowed to see (because I was curious and wanted to look around) the bay where the slaughters occurred complete with the expected detrious, though not an actual slaughter. I was sickened and angry and wanted to destroy the facility. However, I grew up and came to realize that the process, the act of killing animals, was necessary to the survival of my grandparents’ farm. Today, it’s more removed from our lives, but it’s still done.
Gen 1:26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
Dominion means ‘man’ has complete disposition, to include husbandry and being a good steward.
Releasing a domesticated rabbit into “the wild” certainly dooms that rabbit, but that is a choice an owner can make. There are alternatives that may have been better choices, but allowing a government or ‘public opinion’ to control our (reasonable) actions is turning ourselves into controlled ‘sheep’ or ‘lemmings’.
I, for one, refuse to be a ‘metrosexual’.