Short answers, pulled from the story.
Rabbits are born hairless and blind in burrows, while hares are born fully furred and mobile in the open air. Hares are generally larger, have longer pregnancies, and no hare species has ever been domesticated, whereas hundreds of domestic rabbit breeds descend from the European rabbit Oryctolagus cuniculus.
The European rabbit, Oryctolagus cuniculus, is native to southwestern Europe and was first recorded as livestock in Hispania from at least the first century BC. It has since been introduced on every continent except Antarctica and is the ancestor of all domestic rabbit breeds.
European rabbits were introduced to Australia intentionally for hunting, but their rapid reproduction and appetite for vegetation caused severe agricultural damage. Landowners in Australia and New Zealand are legally obliged to control rabbit populations, and the most effective controls have been biological agents myxomatosis and calicivirus.
Rabbit hemorrhagic disease is a highly infectious viral illness first described in domestic Angora rabbits imported from Germany to Jiangsu, China in 1984. A second strain, RHDV2, which can infect wild lagomorphs including hares, was detected for the first time in France in 2010 and has since spread to Canada, Australia, and the United States.
Rabbits appear in Aztec mythology as a pantheon of four hundred gods called the Centzon Totochtin, representing fertility and drunkenness. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean traditions place rabbits on the Moon, and in Anishinaabe belief, the Great Rabbit Nanabozho is connected to the creation of the world. The three rabbits motif appears in Buddhist, Christian, and Jewish symbolism.
The association between rabbits and carrots was largely spread by Bugs Bunny, whose carrot-eating habit was modeled on the character Peter Warne played by Clark Gable in the 1934 film It Happened One Night. Wild rabbits do not naturally prefer carrots, and excess carrot consumption can be unhealthy for domestic rabbits because of the high sugar content.