The Easter Bunny. Jessica Rabbit. Bugs Bunny. Rabbits as pets, food and fur coats. No other domesticated animal has such a complicated and confusing story. Spain is the homeland for the ancestors of our domestic rabbits, where their two thousand year association with humans started as food animals kept by the Romans. Many of the 350 breeds of rabbits were created in 16th to 19th century Europe, and eventually brought to America. North and South America have their own unique species of wild rabbit relatives – the cottontails, jackrabbits and pikas. (In Aztec mythology, native cottontail or jackrabbit divinities called the Centzon Tōtōchtin (Nahuatl “four-hundred rabbits”) were gods of drunkenness and protectors of pulque.)