It is commonly believed that, as far as stabilities are concerned, 'small delays are negligible in some modelling processes'. However, to have an affirmative answer for this common belief is still an open problem for many nonlinear equations. In this paper, the classical Lotka-Volterra prey-predator equation with discrete delaysis considered, and, by using degenerate Lyapunov functionals method, an affirmative answer to this open problem on both local and global stabilities of the prey-predator delay equations is given. It is shown that degenerate Lyapunov functional method is a powerful tool for studying the stability of such nonlinear delay systems. A detailed and explicit procedure of constructing such functionals is provided. Furthermore, some explicit estimates on the allowable sizes of the delays are obtained. However, to answer this in the affirmative is still a difficult problem in general. It is well known that, for the classical autonomous Lotka-Volterra prey-predator system,with bi, a {j > 0 (i,j = 1, 2), if it has a positive equilibrium N* = (AT*, AT^), then it must be globally asymptotically stable. In order to account for time-lag effects in this model, Cushing [4,5] considered the following prey-predator integrodifferential 'Present address: