Bringing Up Bunny

A good friend of mine, Sam*, recently left me with the keys to her apartment, a stack of instructions, and a live rabbit to care for. “Remember to check to make sure my car’s still there!” she shouted from behind the mountain of luggage in her arms.”If it’s not, call the police!”

I felt very reassured. I watched her pull away in a Biobus carrying approximately twenty Elon graduate students headed for an educational tour of the grand city of London. London apparently holds many opportunities for Elon Digital Media graduate students—even for the very first students of the new program, who were now off to make their mark on a small corner of one of the largest and most fascinating cities in the world.

My job looked a lot simpler in comparison: take care of a bunny. Granted, I hadn’t really asked for the job so much as it had been thrust upon me. My friend’s two closest friends—myself and another girl—had exactly one car between us: mine. So when Sam asked us to take care of her apartment while she was in London, I knew the responsibility was going to fall on me.

How hard could taking care of a bunny be, anyway?

When I described the task to another friend, she recoiled in horror. “I took care of that bunny last time Sam was out of the country,” she said. “I still have bruises from where the little monster bit me.”

I got home and opened a Word document that was about six pages long, even single-spaced. It had all the usual instruction on it, such as where to get the mail. But it also contained useful information about the all-important care and feeding of the bunny. Specifically, how to hold the bunny so he will not bite you. How to open his cage so that he will not charge out and bite you. How to set up an area for the bunny to run to work out his pent-up aggression.

This was somewhat unnerving, to say the least. In terms of personality, it seemed Jakey* was not the most highly recommended of bunnies, it seemed. He looked cute enough: a small bundle of fur with wide, dark, unknowing eyes, a habit of twitching in a way that looks partly nervous and partly excited. I’ve loved animals since I was young, and while I can count cats, dogs, crawfish, and butterflies among the critters with whom I have shared a household, I have never owned a rabbit before. Possibly because my mother is horribly allergic to them and would have to be rushed to the hospital every time she walked by a rabbit if we were ever stupid enough to own one.

Naturally, when I approached the cage for the first time, it occurred to me that—just maybe—allergies are genetic, and that maybe I would be as violently allergic to rabbits as my mother is. But there was no time for such practical considerations, as I’d already signed away my winter term to taking care of this animal. Directions in hand, I opened his cage, and he gave a squeak—a sort of squeal which signified his terror at being potentially touched by a new person. This’ll go well, I thought.

I couldn’t get the door all the way down before he zoomed out of the cage and vanished into a Bunny Netherworld--sort of like the one your cat visits every time you think she’s run away, and returns from only after you’ve panicked and put up fliers, and looks at you nonchalantly like you’re some kind of lunatic. (It happened to me, once.) Jakey promptly stowed himself under the armoire, and neither the prospect of food, water nor human attention could coax him out. I ended up with my head shoved as far under the armoire as it could go, and crooning softly to him while holding out hay to him (yes, they eat hay) in what I hoped was an enticing way.

Forty five minutes and thirty kibbles later, I induced him to venture back to his cage. He trembled as I petted him. From the press he had received, I had been expecting a vicious Psycho-Bunny. The reality was a quivering mess of fur that abhorred loud noises and only calmed down when I mastered the technique (described on page six of my bunny-handling manual) of pinching together his ears and stroking them.

Our time together brought different joys into my life each day. He began knocking down his water bottle on a daily basis on Day Three of my duties. Each day I would arrive to a puddle on the floor beside his cage, an empty water bottle, and an irritable bunny. I dutifully mopped up my (somehow he was beginning to be ‘my’ bunny in my head) bunny’s mess like a mother cleaning up after a naughty child, but this behavior continued until the bitter end. The next personal quirk the bunny developed, around Day Ten, was chewing on the bars of the cage. I wasn’t sure if this was wholly natural behavior. It looked like it might be a tad painful for the poor little guy—that was solid metal he was attempting to eat! “No,” I shouted over and over again, but teaching him even one of the basic words in the English language had little to no effect.

By the last day of Sam’s trip, I've enough of it. I even told him so. “You’re a pain in the neck,” I told Jakey. He did not look affronted. In fact, he made what I could only term a needy squeak and hopped closer to me. I obligingly picked him up, grumbling all the while about how much I wouldn’t like him if he bit me.

He didn’t bite me. He curled against my chest like the adorable animal he was. I didn’t even have to follow the instructions for holding him given to me in the manual. He just melted into my arms as if he belonged there, snuggled up to me as if to say thank you.

There’s not much you can say in a moment like that other than “Awww….”

Katie McKenzie

Creative Nonfiction

January 2010

*Names changed to protect the anonymity of person and bunny involved.