A mother hare gives birth to two newborn hares behind Chloe Dalton's office curtain.
1. This Is Love's “Chloe and the Hare” follows Chloe Dalton's relationship with a wild hare found in the English countryside.
2. Chloe Dalton is the narrator and memoirist who cared for the leveret while trying to preserve its independence.
3. The episode asks how a human can help a vulnerable wild animal without turning it into a possession.
4. In winter 2021, Chloe heard a man shouting and a dog barking before finding a one- or two-day-old hare on a farm track.
5. The leveret weighed less than four ounces, had black eyes, long ears, and oversized back feet.
6. Chloe carried the hare indoors using handfuls of grass after it stayed motionless in an exposed position for four hours.
7. A conservationist warned Chloe that the mother might reject a human-scented leveret and that the animal could die from shock or hunger.
8. Chloe's sister supplied powdered milk used for lambs, and Chloe fed the hare with a sterilized dropper.
9. During COVID, Chloe kept the leveret in a grass-lined shoebox and allowed it to move through the house and garden.
10. By about two weeks old, the hare slept under Chloe's bed during the day and returned to the garden in the evening.
11. Chloe's reading connected British hare folklore with witches, storms, burning houses, sacred animals, and a Cornish legend about a white hare.
12. William Cooper's eighteenth-century poems gave Chloe ideas about feeding hares, including grasses, herbs, dandelions, and raspberries.
13. Chloe changed her schedule around the hare, waking with the sun, limiting noise, and stopping television and purse use.
14. A dry stone wall became the boundary the hare crossed before returning each morning to eat and rest in Chloe's office doorway.
15. Removing Chloe's sofa temporarily stopped the hare from entering the house until the cushions lost their unfamiliar smell.
16. Chloe later learned that a hare can reportedly become pregnant while already pregnant, a disputed phenomenon called superfetation.
17. The episode uses Phoebe Judge's calm narration and Chloe's first-person memories to combine natural history with a personal story.
18. Chloe's descriptions of drumming paws, reflected skies in a hare's eye, and nighttime feeding create an intimate observational style.
19. Nature readers drawn to animal behavior and British folklore.
20. Listeners seeking fast-paced crime or conventional wildlife science.
