The Ramblings of Octavo

Now, do you see why I think this is the cutest bunny ever?

It seems the inevitable has happened. Teaspoon, our adorable rabbit has finally entered his teenage months. We know this because he has suddenly stopped using his litter tray for his dry droppings and has taken to leaving them everywhere except his litter tray.

This was to be expected though - apparently rabbits are easy to litter train when they’re babies, but as soon as those hormones start to kick in, they forget all about that and start wanting to mark their territory. One simply has to put up with this annoying behaviour until they reach about 8 months old, at which point they are old enough to neuter. A neutered rabbit will then usually resume using the litter tray - so alas I can no longer brag that our bunny is house-trained… thank god he at least still uses the tray for his pee.

I must say, if it wasn’t for the fact that Mr. T is so adorably cute and full of fun I might be quite put out with his current fecal habits. As it is though, I simply smile good-naturedly and consider vacuuming briefly before resuming reading, or whatever I had been doing in the first place…

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As most of you know, Ibis and I recently adopted a cuddly wittle wabbit. Cutesy lisps aside, he really is adorable.

I (and I know I’m not alone here) was always under the impression that rabbits, while cute, aren’t really good pet material. They’re not cuddly animals that you can train or really form a bond with. Well, Ibis proved me wrong in the most fiendish of ways - she googled. Showering me with forums and websites, I was finally convinced that rabbits, if not good pets, were at least able to be house trained and did in fact make good pets for apartment bound people like us.

Anyway, with that hurdle down, there was nothing for it but to go out and get one. So off we trundled to several pet stores last weekend. We arrived home with a very large cage, a bag full of hay, cat litter, cat litter tray, rabbit pellets, food tray, water bottle and a mineral stone. Oh and a rabbit too of course.

I won’t bore you with all of the tedious details, but suffice to say that a week later we have made huge progress. Teaspoon (his name), is a fully integrated member of our little family and is quite at home in the living room. He’s very clean and he hasn’t ever made a mess in the apartment. If he needs to go to the loo, he simply hops back to his cage and goes there. Of course he does attempt to chew electrical cables and with me being a geek, that’s a bit of a problem since there are heaps of them behind the pc. Luckily we (pretty much) solved that problem on Saturday by bunny proofing all the cables.

Teaspoon is quite content to crawl all over us to get to new and interesting places and gets very indignant if we are so stupid as to let him out later than he feels he should have been. You see, rabbits thump their back feet when they’re scared or angry. We’ve noticed that if Teaspoon gets let out of his cage later than usual in the mornings, he will quite deliberately walk up to you, thump his back feet and then hop off somewhere in a sulky mood. If you put him back in his cage too early at night, he will jump on top of his box and sit facing away from you for hours, deliberately ignoring you and no amount of cutesy speak or offering of toys will get him to acknowledge your presence (although bribing him with treats like basil or peas will at least get him to his food tray – where he will stubbornly eat facing away from you).

On Sunday I was sitting in front of the PC and working while Ibis was in another room. Teaspoon obviously felt that he’d been ignored for too long, because at one point I felt something soft and wet pressed against my foot. I looked down and there was Teaspoon. He looked at me and then darted off behind the curtains. I took no notice and went back to work. Literally a minute later I felt his nose against my foot again. As soon as I looked down, he vanished behind the curtains again. The third time I felt his nose, I finally realised that Teaspoon really was trying to get me to play with him. He actually wanted attention from me. I chased after him and we spent a fun 15 minutes playing catch the rabbit, before he submitted to being stroked and petted, much like a dog.

Anyway, I must say that I never thought it possible that a rabbit could make such a wonderful pet. I guess people always regard them as farm animals and don’t really pay much attention to them…

(more photo’s coming as soon as I figure out a bit more about wordpress).