What a day...while I was driving to get milo the ER called me telling me they have a domestic bunny who's only 4 months old. He has a broken back leg (spiral fracture) and the owners didnt want to be involved with it so they signed him off to be euthanized.
This was about to be a horrible tragedy. Hes only 4 months old why kill him? The ER ran x rays and covered the cost of that and his meds while I called up the rescue i do groomings for.
They agreed to take him in
Hes the sweetest thing who truly deserves better than what he got. I just dropped him off to the shelter and they have an appointment made for him at a trusted vet tomorrow to amputate his leg.
The good news is one of the techs has a lot of special needs animals and fell in love with this sweet lop so she's first in line to adopt him!
Old man at the shelter! He’s 7 and blind in one eye, very thin and his toes are all twisted because of how long his nails were, but he’s already settled in and has been flopping against people when he comes out for socializing ❤️
The perfect boys don’t exi— just kidding! They do, we found them! Ritz and Sunshine both were surrendered for significant broken legs, but have since healed with the support of Dr.Ford. Despite having a noticeably wonky leg, X-rays show that the leg is no longer broken, and Ritz and Sunshine get around great. The last photo is them playing with a baby rabbit who is less than half their age but already bigger than them. They are an absolute dream.
Smol golden cracker boys!! I've been informed that the giant black bun is only a month old, while the golden boys are at least 5. Buns come in all shapes & sizes, but it's always funny to see them grow up together and see it real time!
Ten years ago today, I went for a picnic with a friend.
This should have been fairly unremarkable. It was a beautiful summer's evening, and we planned to have McDonalds in a country park and then go and see Inside Out with her mum. But typically of both of us, we were running late. We had planned to go to a park further afield, but time was short, so we went to a closer one instead. We sat, we ate, and just as we were leaving, something caught friend's eye. Hey look, she said, A black rabbit.
I've kept rabbits now for over 25 years. Wild black rabbits are not outside the realm of possibility. I snapped a photo of the bunny, went a little closer, snapped a better photo, went a little closer still. When I took the photo above, I realised this was not a wild bunny. She had the tell-tale tufts of wispy fur by her ears that meant she was at least part Lionhead, a specific domestic breed that has a mane around their head and ears. Not a wild bunny at all.
I approached her, trying to see how close she would let me get. I got fairly close before she spooked and moved away. When I tried again, she ran in to a patch of brambles and I lost her. I stayed for a few minutes, desperate to find her, but friend's mum was waiting, and really, what could I do to catch a rabbit in a huge country park?
What could I do, indeed. I barely watched the movie, even as it played out on a giant screen in front of me. I was planning how to catch the rabbit.
I thought about it all night, too, and by the next day, I had a working plan. I put the vet basket on its side, and propped up the lid, tying a rope to the prop so I could yank it away as soon as the rabbit was in and trap her. I'd researched how to catch rabbits, how to tempt them in with food. I came prepared with salad and freshly grated carrot - the smell was supposed to lure a rabbit in.
Friend was game for trying, so we packed off back to the country park again, taking food for us and food for the rabbit. But how would we find her? The only hope was to set up our picnic a little ways from where we'd seen her, and wait.
We didn't wait long; she appeared in the exact same spot as before.
We went into action mode as quietly as possible. I carried over the carrier-trap to her piece of grass, and set it down, putting the food inside. We sat low, me holding the rope and willing her to go inside.
She casually continued nibbling on the grass.
It wasn't long before we'd drawn a crowd. What were we doing? Why were we trying to catch a rabbit? Was it ours?
Friend fielded the crowd, while I stayed fixated on the rabbit, who would not be tempted by the dinner I'd laid out for her. Eventually, the crowd drifted away, leaving us with this calm, unconcerned bunny. Friend sat down, opened a pack of Doritos, and munched.
The bunny looked up, looked at her, at her Doritos. Friend held one out. The bunny drew close, and ate the offered crumb of chip. And another. Salt. She was after the salt. Some bunnies love salt. My sister once had a rabbit who would sit sucking her salt lick into oblivion.
With no protests, I commandeered the bag of Doritos. I laid a trail of chips, from where the bunny was, into the carrier-trap.
Slowly, the bunny ate one chip. Then the next, and the next, and the next. Then she had one foot in the carrier. Then she was half inside. Then she was as inside as she was ever going to get. I was right by the carrier, so I quickly closed the lid down, shutting her inside.
Relief and elation flooded through me. We'd done it! We'd actually caught a rabbit in a country park! She was safe. I called the vets to ask if they'd see a stray bunny I'd just caught, and the answer was a yes, so we loaded her into the car and drove off. I caught a glimpse of the bunny in the carrier, on the back seat of friend's car, and all I could see was relief on her face. It was as if she was saying 'Oh thank god that's over.'
We took her to the vets; a healthy girl, no visible problems, and no microchip.
I bought her home, and set her up in a spare cage in the spare room. I posted on facebook, in those days less organised and much more usable than it is now, asking if anyone knew anything of a lost rabbit at the park. A friend replied that she had seen the rabbit there a few weeks prior, but that was the only reply of note. So bunny had no microchip, and no home.
Well, she hadn't had a home. She did now. When I told my Mum how we'd caught her with a trail of Dorito chips, she had laughed. 'You have to call her Dorito.'
I didn't like the idea at first, but the name did stick.
Now I had several dilemmas; there are terrible, deadly diseases that affect rabbits, and they rage like wildfire through wild populations. I knew there were plenty of wild rabbits at the park, and my rabbits, being solely inside, were not vaccinated. That there were wild rabbits also posed an additional problem; rabbits do, after all, breed like rabbits. There was a possibility she was pregnant. I was also about to go on holiday in France for a week, and friend wasn't able to look after the bunny due to her three very active hunting cats. So I made some enquiries to local rescues; can you keep this rabbit in isolation in case she's carrying a disease? I promised to pay for her keep and promised to come back for her, and one nearby sanctuary had the setup and was able to help me out.
We dropped Dorito off, and came home again. I phoned the sanctuary a couple of times to check on her progress; it looked promising. She hadn't come down sick, and was doing well. Things were looking good.
I had a great holiday, but my mind kept wandering back to Dorito. Her isolation was due to end on the last day of my holiday; after that, she was practically in the clear as far as disease was concerned. Nervously, I called the sanctuary from a restaurant in Disneyland Paris, to find out if she had survived her quarantine.
'Hi,' I said when the lady picked up the phone, 'I'm calling to find out how the rabbit I left with you for quarantine is doing?'
'Ah,' said the lady reluctantly. My heart fell. 'She's fine. But she had babies last night.'
Babies! Dorito had babies!
A couple of days later, home from France, I went with friend to see Dorito. We couldn't move her with newborn babies, as rabbits who are stressed out so soon after birth can kill their young. So Dorito would stay with her kits at the sanctuary until they were old enough to move about; she'd given birth in an upstairs hutch, so once they started walking, there was the risk they would fall out.
I still remember seeing Dorito that day, tired but still so calm, sitting downstairs while her babies nested up in the hutch. I asked the lady who ran the sanctuary if she knew how many babies there were. She didn't, and then she opened the hutch and one by one took the babies from the nest to count them. (As a side note, this shouldn't be done; baby rabbits should be left alone in their nest so as not to stress them or their mother.)
The first little baby came out, black like their mother as their fur grew in. Then another. And another. Another and another and another.
Six babies in all. Six tiny, perfect babies.
What on earth was I going to do with seven new rabbits?
I think it was ten days later that I got a call from the sanctuary; the babies had started to move, and were at risk of falling from the hutch. Off we went to collect them. I had a small cage to transport everyone in, and a carton full of hay to make a new nest for the kits. We bought them home - one fell out of the makeshift nest on the way and wobbled around the cage - and then we set them up in the spare room in a two cages rigged together with a door in between. Space for the kits, and space for Dorito.
They settled in beautifully. Dorito was as calm as ever, didn't mind being moved at all, and soon the kits were settled into their new nest.
I cannot tell you how much food we went through as they grew; the cage was often filled with munching as all seven of them sat round a large leaf of greens, devouring it.
We couldn't keep the babies, me and Mum agreed. We already had four rabbits and three guinea pigs and a cat. We couldn't house seven more.
So I sent out feelers among friends, among coworkers, asking everyone if they'd like to adopt a couple of baby rabbits.
No one did.
Our resolve to adopt them out was short lived; they had become our babies too, and we couldn't trust them to strangers. Rabbits often fall prey to bad welfare, shut at the bottom of a garden in a too-small hutch. They were our babies, and they were staying.
When they outgrew their double cage, I bought a run and set it up in the conservatory; it was winter by then, so they wouldn't overheat.
They tore the run to shreds on their first night in.
One battle with the hutch company for a refund later (the wood was really soft and generally rubbish, not up to housing animals), I set off for the DIY store and came back with timber and wire mesh. I spent several days and evenings in the garage, fashioning a bunny-proof run. It went through several improvements and iterations in its life, including the need for a solid floor after the babies ate through the layer of lino they were on, through the carpet underneath, through the underlay underneath that, and down to the solid concrete floor.
I imagine they were a bit disappointed by that.
(Hilariously, they had done all this inside their little wooden house, as if they were trying to hide their escape attempts from me.)
Weeks passed, and now the run needed a new iteration; Dorito was exhausted from nursing the six growing kits, and they weren't stopping on their own. So I took Dorito out and gave her her own cage for a while whilst the babies got used to not nursing, and she could have some peace. When the process was complete, I reunited the family.
The babies grew, and Dorito put on weight, and her long lionhead fur began to grow from a couple of scrawny tufts to a fuller mane. The babies, tellingly, were all the same tawny brown colouring of wild rabbits. So their father was a wild bun after all. Four of the babies sprouted manes of their own; two remained looking for all the world as if they were completely wild.
From their earliest days, I had kept a log of weights and any distinguishing features (it turned out to be a lifetime's work to tell them all apart). We had them sexed; two girls and four boys. It was 2015; Avengers: Age of Ultron had just been released, so they all got Marvel related names. Rory (officially short for Lorelai, but that name was never used) was the biggest, and a girl. Simmons was one of the two who looked entirely wild; her counterpart was named Fitz. Then there were Thor, Loki, and Steve. Loki was the smallest, while Steve had a perpetually grumpy look about him, and preferred his own company.
The next challenge was separating them as they reached sexual maturity. I put a divider down the middle of the large run; boys on one side, girls on the other, until they were big enough to be neutered.
One morning I came down to find that Loki had scaled the dividing wall and was in with his mother and sisters. Chaos ensued as we debated emergency spays for the girls; we could not house an exponential number of rabbits. I was reluctant in case they were pregnant, but practicality had to win out. In the end, my concerns didn't matter. When they were spayed, there was no sign of any pregnancies. A relief.
Ah, but you see, I've gotten ahead of myself, because there was another very important twist in the tale.
Back when Dorito and her babies were still living in the double cage, around mid October, once we had realised we were keeping everyone, we began to search for a way to house them outside. Some people house their outside buns in full-sized sheds, with access to a run in the fresh air, so we investigated that avenue. We went to a nearby business that sold sheds to look around and see if there was anything suitable.
And there, in a dark corner of the premises, was a tiny hutch with four baby rabbits in it, with no food, no hay to eat, and their water gone green.
Share some bunny love with this adorable rabbit stamp design! Ideal for bunny lovers, rabbit rescue supporters, or anyone who enjoys cute and funny animals.
Like it?
Get this design from my Redbubble shop by clicking here
there’s an almost indescribable joy in seeing the foster bun who, for 3 months, has been eyeballing you and hiding from you finally blooming, being comfortable around you and accepting your presence and trying to communicate with you.
