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Petey The Rabbit had been acting a bit “off her feed” for a few days, hiding out inside her various boxes instead of keeping a vigilant watch from on top. Friday morning I had her out on the back deck. She seemed to be breathing heavily, and offered no resistance to being scooped up – her usual attitude toward being captured is, ”Ha! Catch me if you can, buddy.” Plus, she started to hold her chin up in a funny way. So I took her in to the vet.
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Well, that didn’t go so good. She had been to the vet before, and was very passive and well-behaved, in a somewhat nervous way. You expect that when you bring a rabbit into a building that smelled of dogs and cats – predators! But this time it wasn’t long before Pete started to stress out, and then to panic. Then she went into cardiac arrest, and that was that. The vet, the nurse, and I couldn’t do much more than watch her die.
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Petey was eight years old, as far as we could tell, which is fairly old for a rabbit. She definitely had some grey hair! We got her from a friend whose school/sports/life schedule had just gotten too busy when she started high school. She lived with us for four years, and got along famously with our old rabbit Bruno. Bruno was definitely the alpha rabbit, being the male and over twice her size, but Pete was the brains behind the operation.
When Bruno passed away last December, Pete seemed to need a friend, so we got Mr. Skippy from the pound. Skippy and Petey bonded quickly, and turned out to be a great pair, in spite of the May/December aspect of the relationship (we think Skippy is around 2 years old). Pete was very happy to finally take on the roles of both alpha rabbit and hutch queen. That way she finally got the lion’s share of any mutual grooming.
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Petey was a quick, energetic, yet cautious and affectionate bunny that had a couple interesting personality traits/quirks:
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- She liked being in her hutch. She liked hopping around the deck. She liked being held. But she DIDN’T like transitioning between any of these! She could be very evasive when it was time to be picked up. I think it hearkens back to the days of the wild rabbits, when their greatest fear was “death from above” – hawks, owls, etc. The first rabbit we ever had, Zeb, had a definite fear of airplanes.
- On rare occasions Pete would escape from the deck. Instead of tearing off across the yard, she would make a U-turn and go under the deck. As in way under the deck. As in, into the dark, dank, narrow, forgotten, nearly unreachable recesses WAY back in there. It was there that she would start to dig her Hole To China. And being fast, extremely determined, and essentially pure black, she was very tough to corral. Especially by a six foot tall human, skooching around the decaying leaves on his belly, armed only with a broom, and harboring a healthy fear both of cranial bruises and protruding deck nails.
- The best thing to ever happen to Petey was Bruno. In fact, in her earlier life she was assumed to be a male. But when she moved in with Bruno, her behavior made it obvious that she was definitely a Petey, and not a Peter! Bruno had been fixed, so Pete was disappointed by the lack of litters. But she would build nests a couple times a year, just in case. When the nest building instinct hit, she would get totally fixated, tirelessly building the nest day and night out of what ever she could find – shredded paper salvaged from the litter box, torn up phone books, grass, hair pulled from her belly, and so on. And when she was on a nest building binge, you’d better not get in her way!
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Petey, getting ready for another nesting frenzy
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I think rabbits, although small and passive compared you your typical dog or cat, make really great pets. Sure, they're cute. But what makes them endearing is their distinct personalities and individual character. Petey sure had plenty of both.
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