Bunny Rabbit Blues

Bunny Rabbit Blues

 

I awoke this morning to find a baby bunny sitting in my living room.

 

It looks undamaged but isn’t trying to escape, which tells me it’s either in shock or injured internally. It’s warm and hunched properly, so I’ve wrapped it loosely in a towel.

 

I’ve put a small apple slice and some peas and cubed carrots in with it so see if that will arouse interest, but I don’t have a lot of hope it will survive if it doesn’t perk up pretty soon.

 

I don’t mind when Hunter (aptly named!) catches and kills mice and rats. But when he brings in little bunnies or birds I want to find way to “educate” him: “not these ones! Leave these ones alone!”  (I put a small uninjured bird back outside to fly away just two days ago.)

 

Alas, he doesn’t get the picture…

 

It kinda breaks my heart.  But keeping Hunter indoors would break his heart because he’s always been an outdoor cat (since before he came to me).

 

I have another indoor cat, Charli, who wouldn’t be caught dead outside. She has always been an indoor cat. Anything outside my bedroom causes her distress. If I try to introduce her to other rooms in my home, she rakes me with her claws and catapults off my shoulder, clearly stating, “Nooooooooo!!!!!!”

 

Anyway, I tried saving another bunny that Hunter brought me last year who was in this same sorry state, and it didn’t survive.

 

When they’re alive and kicking, acting scared, I carry them right back outside and put them in a thicket near here so they can escape.

 

But until this one revives and shows some spunk, the best I can hope for it that it’s in shock and will slowly recover so I can release it…

 

Bunnies are so darned cute not even Jackie objects to them hopping around in the flower garden that she works so hard keeping beautiful, eating some of her bulbs…

 

She calls Hunter a “meanie” when he catches baby bunnies and birds. She considers him wonderful when he catches and kills mice and rats, though!!! “Attaboy, Hunter!”

 

She’s a species-ist. There are good fur-bearers (cats, dogs, goats, rabbits) and bad fur-bearers (mice, rats, squirrels, opossums) in her lexicon.

 

I feel kinda bad when any of them get killed… but I’m the exception, not the rule!

 

I remember one time when I was rehabbing two fawns from the Mount St Helens eruption in 1980, I had a jug of water outside their pen that I used to refill their trough.

 

One morning I came out and found a little mouse who had fallen into the water jug and drowned. I felt sooooo bad, thinking of how long it must have swum and struggled to find a way out before succumbing to drowning… The vision still haunts me, to this day.

 

I know sometimes pests need to be killed, but I always make sure they’re killed quickly. No sticky traps, no De-Con…  Sentient beings who can suffer require my best efforts NOT to cause them suffering…

 

I have a t-shirt that proclaims, “Caring for animals is how I roll. It’s in my heart, it’s in my soul….”

 

That’s me, in a nutshell!!!

 

Update: As expected, the bunny didn’t make it but as it turns out, Hunter brought me an already-doomed bunny. I discovered a huge, pus-filled sac under its chin and several pus-filled areas elsewhere on its body, none of which could have developed over the course of a few hours since Hunter carried it in. Sad…