All along the Wall there were grass-covered minefields, so there were a lot of free-running rabbits, too light to set off a mine, no other beasts to prey upon them. At mating time, the hormone-crazy rabbits would smell a partner on the other side, and they would go crazy, producing pining-rabbit sound, trying desperately to find a hole in the Wall. The rabbits would drive the guards out of their minds, but they could not shoot them because they had to save their bullets for the humans trying to defect. Everybody in Berlin knew that the rabbit-mating season was the worst time to escape across the Wall, because the rabbits made the guards very trigger-happy.
Outrageous though it may have been, I always found the story funny and poignant – the unnaturalness of the Cold War, the love that knew no boundaries, the Wall brought down by horny rodents.
(Aleksandar Hemon in The Lazarus Project)
