MindSpinner

Two small lionhead bunnies joined our household this year in the usual way, and the usual way is this: Offspring desire a new pet and are indulged because I have a weak spot for both offspring and pets. Offspring lose interest in new pet, for the most part, after a month or two or three, but I fall head over heels for pet, and so pet stays. In the matter of the bunnies, just multiply by two, and you have the story.

Pet, however, is the wrong word, for it implies a lesser position and human ownership besides. If you watch who waits on whom around here, you would logically conclude that the fur folk collectively own me, carefully train me and negotiate procedures only under duress, if then. (No amount of duress, for example, has convinced the cat that the couch is not a scratching post and the dogs that the Christmas tree doesn’t need christening.)

The white bunny, one Thomasin, is a case in point. He’s the bunny you’d most like to hold; if he doesn’t like holding, he doesn’t let on.

The hunger strike began gradually. First he snubbed the rabbit pellets I bought at Kroger when the bag from the pet store ran out. I had to drive 60 miles roundtrip to buy more of the pet store brand to which he was accustomed. I bought four bags, along with the sweet-smelling timothy hay rabbits are supposed to have, too.

Thomasin’s companion is a charcoal-colored bunny named Shawntycleer. (Yes, I know how to spell Chaunticleer, but Dark-Haired Daughter did not.) Shawntycleer, when turned upside down, looks rather like a boy to us, but we’re really not sure. Thomasin emphatically disagrees and acts on his opinions; that’s where he gets his nickname, Rapist Rabbit. In any case, to spare Shawnty a life of incessant and generally unwelcome sex, we house Thomasin and Shawnty in two different cages when they are inside and two different pens when they are outside. The life of companionship we had envisioned for them amounts to their sitting next to each other on occasion and touching noses between bars. (Dating relationships between parents of teenagers can work a lot like this.)

Shawntycleer is to be distinguished from Thomasin not only by means of a stark contrast in color, but also in his/her comfort level at being carried or held. Cooperation can suddenly melt into a bid for freedom - a frantic roiling of fur, ears, and claws like blackberry thorns. Because she (or he) is so easily spooked, when I pick Shawnty up, I’m always crooning that song,”a spooky little girl like you.” Shawnty is probably eventually doomed to give up a literary if misspelled name in favor of becoming “Spooky” instead.

But at least Shawnty/Spooky can be depended upon to clean up that little bowl of rabbit pellets, morning and night. Thomasin, on the other hand, began eating fewer and fewer of his pet store rabbit pellets, day in and day out, until he was eating, earlier this week, none at all. Nothing in. Nothing out. He wiggled his nose, turned it up, and vowed a hunger strike to the death. Death can happen in fairly short order with rabbits, in such cases, as I understand it. There’s supposed to be stuff going in regularly and stuff coming out regularly, and any interruption of the process of turning elongated cylindrical pellets into little round pellets is to be viewed as a medical emergency.

So I began to ply him with a diet of treats. He’s always liked a tiny carrot or two. He ate those. He likes apple slices, it turns out. Indeed, he likes wheat berries and lentils, too, and is simply beside himself for red lettuce leaves and baby spinach. In fact, when I come to feed him next, he has eaten everything. It’s delicacies in, pellets out.

All he wants, you know, is real bunny food - gourmet salads morning and night. He smirks at me as if to say that, if I’d let him out in the garden, he could procure his own gourmet salads and save me the trouble, but he patiently suffers the fact that I am a prisoner of my fears - neighborhood dogs, hawks, owls, coyotes, garden destruction and the lure of freedom that might make him suddenly hard to catch.

All in all, he considers his hunger strike and my consequent retraining a complete success. To pass the time, he amuses himself with the ironic fact that adult human beings take classes, read books, and conduct experiments in order to learn more about behavioral modification theory and practice whereas the subject is so easily mastered by furry little bunnies and six-week-old infants.