Short answers, pulled from the story.
The European hare is primarily herbivorous. In spring and summer it feeds on soy, clover, corn poppy, wild grasses, and herbs. In autumn and winter it shifts to winter wheat and woody material including the bark and vascular tissue of young fruit trees, and it is sometimes drawn by hunters using sugar beet and carrots as bait.
European hares box mainly during the spring mating season, when activity peaks in March and April. Despite long-held assumptions, boxing is primarily between a female and a male: the female strikes a suitor to signal she is not ready to mate or to test his determination. The behaviour is not simply competition between rival males.
The European hare can reach 70 kilometres per hour. Its speed is supported by wider nostrils, a proportionally larger heart, and dark limb musculature that provides stamina for sustained flight across open country rather than short sprints.
The European hare has been introduced to North America (Ontario, New York State), much of South America including Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Chile, Peru, and the Falkland Islands, as well as Australia and both islands of New Zealand. Earlier, it may have been brought to Great Britain between 500 and 300 BCE.
European hare populations have been declining since the 1960s. The main causes are the intensification of agriculture, which has reduced habitat diversity, along with climate change and increased predation. In France, Spain, and Greece, importing hares from Eastern European countries has also threatened regional gene pools.
The hare's springtime mating behaviour inspired the English idiom "mad as a March hare", which appears in the 16th-century writings of John Skelton and Sir Thomas More, and later in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. In Northern Europe, the hare is a longstanding Easter symbol; the 19th-century scholar Charles Isaac Elton linked Easter folk customs in Leicestershire to possible pre-Christian hare worship, though scholars such as John Andrew Boyle have questioned how far that connection can be taken.