Rabbit starvation: Why you can die even with a stomach full of lean meat

“You’ll starve to death if you only eat rabbit meat” is one of those common refrains you learn when getting into survival. It’s a fun fact you might share over a beer or to show off how woodsy you are to your LARPer friends. And while it’s actually true and worth understanding why, it doesn’t actually happen much anymore — we’ve struggled to find modern documented cases. This was far more common in the wild frontier days when people were starving for food over the winter, which happens to also be when wild animals are at their leanest because they’ve burned off their fat. These frontiersmen also didn’t understand local vegetation and habitats the way indigenous people did.