Two giant continental rabbits, Roberto and Amy, were married in a mock ceremony in Somerset, reportedly "the UK's first ever rabbit wedding." While it's astonishing that such a beautiful occasion had never taken place before, news accounts have been painting this as the subject of controversy.

"A MOCK rabbit wedding at a Somerset tourist attraction has been slammed for 'belittling' the animals," says the Sun.

Now that's crazy, I thought to myself upon first reading the account. What could bring more dignity to two oversized bunnies than little bowler hats and wedding veils? Animals love dressing up. The other thing I thought was man, what a waste of effort. With all the hideous things people do to animals, this is what you choose to get worked up about?

So I looked through a couple of different articles about the wedding, and found that all of them emphasize the protest angle, and all of them use the same tepid quote from a Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals representative:

"We would be opposed to anything that would cause distress or suffering to animals and we are opposed to the dressing up of animals as it belittles them," said spokeswoman Joanna Barr. "This puts the wrong message across. Animals are not toys to be dressed up."

The use of the hypothetical "would be" makes me wonder if this protest was not quite all it was made out to be. I wonder if maybe someone assigned to write a silly story about a bunny wedding called the RSPCA to give the story a little more weight, and the RSPCA hadn't really thought that much about the rabbit wedding because it's not really a big deal, and just sort of gave their stock answer to questions of using animals as toys, and then the whole thing ends up in an echo chamber. I couldn't find any mention of the affair on the RSPCA wesbite

Still, there's much to learn from the Sun's coverage. First of all, the picture of the priest with the rabbits is priceless, and it's nice to just sit around and think about three-foot long giant rabbits in love. Then at the end, there's this little nugget of information:

The Guinness Book of Records previously confirmed that Roberto was the longest rabbit they had heard about. But the organisation has stopped accepting records for large pets in an attempt to stop owners overfeeding their animals.