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Watch Boxing Hares Battle In A Mating Ritual

Hare MMA is here at last.

It looks like a petty slap-fight but the battle is much more dramatic: A female hare fighting it out with her male suitors, to judge which will be her worthy mate.

According to the video description, whisky distillery worker and hobbyist photographer Alister Kemp, from Evanton, Scotland found these boxing hares in Cairngorms National Park.

Being a female mountain hare is exhausting. Their breeding season lasts from January to August, and the males are fertile year-round. Ovulation is induced by mating, and an ovulating hare can be impregnated again by a waiting male almost immediately after giving birth, Dana Krempels, a biologist at Florida's University of Miami tells National Geographic.

Needless to say, they're willing to fight to make sure their next offspring will have the strongest genes possible. To determine this, they sometimes battle it out bunny-style, the female racing around until her pursuant pack of wannabes gets tired, leaving only the strongest to catch up and duke it out.

Or sometimes the female is simply not ready to mate, so she delivers a couple slugs to the face. Hey, whatever works.