Bad Bunnies!

Bunnies also go through puberty. Nobody told us this to begin with. All we'd ever heard about bunnies is that they were lovely as pets and very quiet. We have now come to realise that the reason people say this is because it is the children who always have the rabbits and generally the rabbit is kept outside and generally doesn't get to do much except hop around a cage.

Being very pro-active bunny owners, Barry and I decided we would do our homework and discovered that rabbits are actually very social animals who love attention, indeed they crave it. They also need a goodly amount of exercise every day or they get fat and slow.

With these things in mind we began a routine of letting the two of them out at least for a couple of hours a day and if we were at home the whole day we did not put them in the cage at all. The bunnies live indoors as we have no garden but this does not stop them from racing around our house with great abandon.

Barry and I are both big lovers of fantasy and so the rabbits are named Lolth (named for the demon goddes of spiders and dark elves) and Bane (a god who's portfolios include strife and pandemonium). We should have realised that naming an animal goes partly towards determining its personality which is why no child should ever be called Chucky, nor should any Jack Russel for that matter.

It was around about the 5 month mark when we started noticing that bunnies can go bad. Up until then they had been the sweet, cute, fluffy little friends we'd always dreamed of. Our friends and family were charmed, we were charmed, we thought we'd found the perfect pets... and then the little cretins discovered what teeth are for.

Both of them had been to the vet to have the chop, something that is necessary for both sexes in rabbits, so there were no more worries about little bunnies suddenly appearing but we now have the problem that our rabbits are stuck as eternal teenagers. This means that anything we find annoying or naughty is something they feel the need to do a lot.

Lolth is very reminiscent of a 15 yr old girl. She swishes about the place looking ultra-cute and wrapping Barry around her spotless white paw as she swindles all manner of goodies out of him. True to form, she does not like me at all because I am very strict about their diet and only give them as much as they are allowed, which includes yummy treats but only when they have been good. She also has a fascination with ripping wallpaper off walls and chewing plaster. All manner of mineral stones and chewing aids and disciplinary action have done nothing to help this and though she will stop it for a time, as soon as I do something to displease the little princess, she heads straight for the nearest wall.

Bane, on the other hand, is very focused on only two things. One is how fast he can run up and down the stairs of our maisonnette: a great game that he engages in constantly. The other is a covert operation to get behind the couch.
He will wait in absolute stillness in a corner of the living room just waiting for that moment when your back is turned or you urgently need to visit the loo and then hey presto! In a shot he is behind the couch. This then involves me searching every nook and cranny to track him down again as he wiggles his away under the table and behind the dressoir and then sits ever so quietly in a dark spot until I find him. Its his version of hide and seek and he loves it. I, on the other hand, do not love it because he always pulls this stunt at the most inconvenient of moments, such as five minutes before I have to go off somewhere.

Of course, being the social animals that they are they also love attention. If they don't get what they believe is enough attention they will show you their displeasure by parading through the living room and thumping their disproportionately large hind legs against the laminated wood floor (to begin with we thought the laminated floor would put them off doing a lot of running as it is very smooth... what can I tell you, apparently evolution works faster in rabbits).

They also make use of this thumping trick on Saturday mornings. As soon as they realise that we are awake the thumping starts and will not cease until one of us has got out of bed to go down and give them a pet on the head and some more hay. If Barry goes down, Lolth also manages to swindle some extra yummy food out of him which make her so proud of herself that she will then follow it up by chewing on the cables of my sewing machine pedal later in the day just so I know who's the real lady of the manor. That rabbit has an abnormally long memory!

But annoying little peccadilloes aside, I do love our floppy eared children. I can forgive all their wrongdoing the second they jump up on the couch and cuddle up with us to watch a movie (ok, yes, Lolth is only it for the possible snacks, but I try to ignore that.)