Meet the rabbits I took care of for a year
So I mentioned before I worked at a place that is a supervised playground for local kids with some small farm animals like chicken, ducks, gooses, goats, but my favorite by far were the rabbits and guinea pigs, also because I myself have guinea pigs for pets. It’s fascinating how you really start to see animals personalities once you spend some time with them. All the rabbits there where so different.
I worked there for a year in context of a voluntary ecological year,and I still go back there sometimes to visit the people, and the animals. One of my guinea pigs I had to give up, so I left it there, and she is doing great. Some of the rabbits have died since I worked there, but I remember all of them very fondly, and I wanted to draw them for a long time.
Oskar
The oldest rabbit (6 or 7 years at that time I think) in the enclosure, and pretty sure the alpha male of the group (they had a pretty intense power dynamic going on). He was the most chill rabbit I have ever seen, by far. As soon as he realized I’m not one of the kids that just come to pet the animals, but actually take care of them, he started following me around at diner time, and he was always up for cuddling, just being picked up he couldn’t stand. I think he actually integrated me into the group, because he licked my hand whenever I petted him,like he wanted to pet me back, like he did with the other rabbits. None of the others ever did that.
He loved to dose away in the sun so much, one time we renovated the whole enclosure around him and he didn’t care. He was such a chill little old man, it was hard to believe he would defend his position as leader of the group, oh, but he did, that one time a new male was introduced to the group. I couldn’t believe how agressive he could be, but he made his position very clear very quickly.
Oskar is a lion-head rabbit, so he had some fluffy hair around his neck like a mane. I integrated that into the OC design, same as the light chronic eye infection he had since before his previous owner had brought him, and never could quite shake off.
—
Krümel
(which in german means (fine) crumbs, but is also a pet name for small toddlers)
The funny thing with this one was that for months we couldn’t seem to find out what gender she was. I didn’t know enough about rabbits, and everyone else who apparently knew their stuff said something else until we settled on female (I think the vet we visited actually had that wrong). So, gender neutral name. The OC’s design is female, but tomboyish.
Krümel was one of the rabbits that came along while I worked there. There was a lot of excitement around her appearance, because she... just showed up one day on the grounds. Someone must have thrown her over the fence or something like that, and it took us a whole week to catch her and put her to the others in the enclosure. It took a while to settle her into the bunch, but she soon joined the main group and especially took a liking to Oskar.
The best part of the story was that her owners actually showed up one day. They told me they had instructed a friend to bring Krümel to us, and had no idea how this had turned out. Not sure if to believe them, but they never came back, so...
Krümel was one of the youngest rabbits there, between one and two years old from what the owners told me. She was super active and curious and ran around all the time, and she was fast. But she was also one of the more trusting rabbits, which means besides Oskar she was the only one that didn’t immediately run away if you tried to pet her. Not always at least.
At one point we build a small bed for grass and herbs within the rodent enclosure, but high enough that the rabbits wouldn’t reach it. So we thought. Before we could even plant something in there, a couple weeks were spend with a game between Krümel and we, in where I came to work in the morning and found the soil in the bed completely turned over, Krümel still sitting in it most of the time, then we took some time to right it, and built it higher, with fences from wood, later parts of an old metal fence. And still, same thing next morning. We just couldn’t comprehend how she kept finding ways into this more and more ridiculously reinforced enclosure, but she did.
This girl bested us.
—
Helge & Einstein
The other really old rabbit there was the really cute dwarf rabbit Helge with a beautiful fur pattern. From what I’ve been told, he and Oskar formerly belonged to the same person, and were left in our care because they wouldn’t get along and the owner couldn’t keep them. I... could see that.
Helge was a bit of a loner. And aggressive. He almost never left that one hutch he occupied; he could have, he just didn’t want to. In the rare cases when he did come out (or when we took him outside) he mostly just ran in circles, avoiding any other rabbit and made his way back inside, or in contrast to that, he attacked the others. He didn’t have a lot of friends. And he wasn’t overly fond of being touched. Which means he crouched in a corner, made small mad noises, and acted like he wanted to bite, while knocking louder with his feet. It was rather cute. Like an angry little old man grumbling over the youth. I always had to remind the kids to repsect his defensive demenour.
The only other rabbit he got along with was Einstein. She had a similar problem within the group; she was too timid to defend herself and could never leave the hutch, or she would have been attacked. She was really calm, was also really scared of humans. She wasn’t a lop-eared rabbit, but in the OC’s design I still drew her with drooping ears to sho her shyness (the ears aren’t as short as the lopped ones).
The two of them kept each other company, together in that hutch. That way it was okay, they never really wanted to leave it, and we made sure they got enough to eat. It just meant we had to clean that hutch more intensely, with them being in there all the time...
—
Sophie
She was a special case. Very special, very reclusive. Another loner, but she did go outside, which resulted in her avoiding the other rabbits at all times and hiding in every corner of the enclosure. She got along with the guinea pigs rather well.
She also had a very weird knack for being sick or slightly hurt; most of the time, a reoccuring eye infection or a hurt toe. She had some new little thing so often I jokingly wondered if she did it on purpose. We had a separate hutch awayy from the ground where sick and hurt rabbits were kept for the time being; the isolation ward. Maybe she just liked the place for herself without having to worry about the others...
Anyways, having to go to the vet for her slightly injured toes every other month drove me insane, because apparently bringing the rabbits to the vet bcame only my job at some point, and no one else’s, so I had to work that bit into her OC’s design.
Studying the pictures I notices she actually had really pretty bright blue eyes, which was surprising for me; every guinea pig I’ve drawn has brown eyes, without exception.
That’s enough for now.
This is part one. There’s more. Soo much more.
