Astonishingly Large Rabbit Refuses To Participate In Salad-Eating Contest

Sometimes you're just not in the mood for a spectacle. That's true for everyone—even gigantic 20-pound rabbits bred to be salad-eating machines. This is the crux of a recent L.A. Times story (penned by Takeout contributor Jamie Loftus!) about a woefully unbalanced salad-eating contest between the aforementioned rabbit and a human social media superstar.

Per Loftus, a crowd recently gathered to watch 27-year-old competitive eater Raina Huang compete against a rabbit named Honey "Mega" Bunny. In one corner was Huang, who has millions of followers across social media thanks to her extreme eating endeavors. In the other was Mega Bunny, a gargantuan rabbit perfectly poised to win the first Major League Eating-recognized salad-eating contest. Each competitor received four massive bowls of lettuce, weighing it at more than two pounds of salad. The crowd roared, and the competition kicked off as the "Rocky" theme blared—but, as the times puts it, "Mega Bunny did not eat a shred of lettuce." Loftus writes:

"The entire competition. Call it performance anxiety, dislike of chopped salad or, as her handler Louis Moses believed, both. All 20 pounds of her stared at the heap of shredded lettuce, kale and carrots with apathy, more used to the steady diet of vegetables and 'bunny granola' that her owner makes for her and 19 oversized rabbit peers."

As Mega Bunny sat stoically, Huang annihilated the salad in under five minutes. Mega even turned her back to the plate entirely in the seventh minute, per Loftus. Ah, well. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink; you can place a bunny in front of a crowd, but you can't make her indulge in two pounds of salad.

Ultimately, the Times piece is a tale of humanity, stubbornness, and good old-fashioned grit. Check out the full story here.