As I was saying previously, we gave the bunnies away. They were cute, they were sweet, but they were high-maintenance. If you want to read about their arrival in our lives, I’ve back-posted those letters here and here. Amy tells me that it’s a heart-warming story, and she recommends you read it.
Bear in mind that she’s insane and has my wedding ring to prove it.
The bunnies’ names were Monty (the boy) and MurderBunny (the girl). Take a wild guess which one I named. Then take a wild guess as to why Amy must be insane to marry me.
The biggest problem with the bunnies was their interest in chewing. We have power cables, data cables, etc., all over the place. Either we had to entirely overhaul the whole house, or sequester them in a particular place. Fortunately, this house has a small extra bedroom that we never really used, so we cleaned it out and turned it into the bunny room. Amy, industrious little sweetheart that she is, constructed a spacious home for them out of mesh panels zip-tied together. And, yes, I means spacious: 5′ by 5′ by 3′, with three levels and ramps. And, no, it wasn’t simply a cage. They liked it, they regarded it as their home, and they often slept there even when the cage doors were open (usually for several hours each day). Indeed, MurderBunny would often run into it to escape me when I entered the room.
MurderBunny didn’t particularly like me. <cough> bitch <cough>
So the bunnies had plenty of room. The problem then became that we could only socialize with them to the exclusion of everything else, because we had to go into that room and stay there. We already had two cats, three birds, and three aquaria. It was just an extra step that I wasn’t willing to take every single day of every week. After a while, Amy came to the same conclusion. We made sure the bunnies were happy, healthy, and well-fed (and, ahem, fixed), but we just couldn’t spend the time to socialize them as much as we would have liked. Or, we thought, give them as much attention as they deserved.
It wasn’t a happy decision, but we decided we needed to give them away. But to whom? Most people would have simply put them into a hutch in the backyard and ignored them. A few were interested in getting them as pets for their kids, which is a *horrible* idea. Any parents who’ve found themselves raising a child’s begged-for puppy will understand this. Additionally, people think of bunnies as big gerbils with funny ears, but they’re much smarter than that. Indeed, they may be as smart as dogs . . . with the concurrent need for companionship and capacity to get into trouble.
Thus, the vasy majority of adoption candidates were ruled out. In fact, ALL of the adoption candidates were ruled out. It took months before any serious options presented themselves. And it required a long drive. Amy was reluctant to ask me to do it, but I didn’t really see it as an issue. We wanted to give the bunnies to a good home, and this was it. So we borrowed my dad’s light pick-up, herded the bunnies into our biggest carrier (yes, room enough for them to move around), loaded up the truck bed with the cage (broken down), rabbit food, bedding, litterboxes, toys, etc., and set off into the morning.
Fortunately, Amy and I travel well together. Some have told me that such a trip with their spouse would be an ordeal, but Amy and I get along so well that it was fun. Still, it was tiring.
We returned home about 3 a.m. We’d have been home earlier, but we spent some hours with the adoptive couple as we gave them the rundown on the bunnies. They already had one of their own, so bringing them up to speed wasn’t difficult. We also assembled the cage for them, ran through clicker-training technique, showed them how we handled the litterboxes, and so forth. The litterbox bedding was a revelation. They had been using the old-school box of hay, but Amy had done plenty of research and so our standard method lasted longer while staying cleaner.
Amy gets all the credit for that. Clueless me would have just gone with the traditional box-o-hay.
We liked the couple and they seemed a good fit for the bunnies. They even liked the names. All in all, it was pretty much a best-case scenario, so we were pretty happy as we drove home. Since then, Amy has been getting some updates on the bunnies and they seem to have adapted well. In particular, MurderBunny has been friendly and is happy to play with them.
<cough>bitch<cough>
