Saturday 30 January 2010

Bun to be Wild

Pea, Pod, Cosmos and Goofy are wild (cross?) rabbits, hand-reared from a very young age. And they are great fun.

The wild streak can make the group quite manic at times, especially living in a group of four where there is always one doing something to set the others off into chaos.

Each of them sits on a different point on the scale of trust towards humans. When you go in to see them, outside of the usual feeding times, one will immediately bound up to you and place their paws on you to see what you are doing and one will move to the farthest corner and eye you suspiciously. The other two will lurk somewhere between, waiting to see what time it is - treat-time, cleaning-time or being-picked-up-for-health-checks-time! But all of them are ultimately friendly towards people and happy to be stroked once they have gotten to know you.

Today whilst cleaning them out, I repeatedly had to encourage them to move out of my way, to which they generally responded grumpily ("Hey, I was eating/relaxing-in that bit of hay!"), moved to somewhere I hadn't cleaned yet and glared at me. By the time this process had been repeated around the whole of their enclosure, we were left with four bunnies crammed into one small corner! ("Well, you've moved us from everywhere else!") It looked very cute and was one of the funniest moments I've experienced at the Rescue, though I don't think they really saw it that way. As with most of our cleaning-related stories, the incident ended with happy bunnies with their faces stuck into a pile of fresh Timothy Hay and dried grass, so I think they've forgiven me.

"Dude! Will you stop crowding me?
I'm trying to use the bathroom here!"

Caroline told me she fears these lovely little things will likely spend most or all of the rest of their lives stuck at the Rescue, which would be a great shame. It's probably true that they would be far too mischievous to be general house rabbits (you'd keep finding them under the sofa cushions and inside the VCR) and they are expert diggers/chewers, so you'd need a pretty well built enclosure to house them outside. But who wouldn't want to take in a cute little bunch of crazy bunnies that were almost guaranteed to make you laugh out loud every day?!

So now I need to save up to buy a house with a bigger garden. You have until then to get the adoption forms in before me... ;-)

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