Two facts sit uncomfortably together. Introduced to Australia in the nineteenth century, European rabbits spread across the continent and remain among the most damaging vertebrate pests anywhere. In their native Iberian range the same species has declined by a large margin since the mid twentieth century.
The cause is disease, largely deliberate. Myxoma virus was released in France and Australia in the 1950s, reaching Iberia within a few years, and rabbit haemorrhagic disease arrived in the 1980s with a further variant appearing around 2010. Combined with habitat loss and agricultural change, they cut Iberian rabbit populations sharply. Because the Iberian lynx and the Spanish imperial eagle both depend on rabbits as their principal prey, the collapse propagated up the food web, and lynx recovery programmes have had to restore rabbit populations first.
The pattern is a caution against reasoning about a species from a single population. Global abundance and local security are different quantities, and a conservation status describes the species across its native range, not its introduced ones.