Rabbits

No music here right now, though it will return. Instead I present a different kind of post for a very important happening: on Friday, January 13^th, my favourite rabbit, a small black bundle of pure sweet joy with a white tipped nose and feet (and a dash of white on her left collar) died. It was incredibly sudden, as such things with rabbits often are. She went from perfectly fine the night before, playing and binkying (or at least seemingly perfectly fine: rabbits are hiders in all ways, they hide illness and injury as long as possible—a necessary survival strategy for animals that almost everything tries to eat) to hunched up into a largely unresponsive ball. Friday evening, seeing how bad things had gotten, we rushed her to the nearest emergency clinic an hour-and-a-half away, but she was beyond saving at that point and she died about an hour after getting to the clinic. Surgery, or any other kind of intervention, just wasn’t an option.

Anyone who has lost a pet they have been really close to, particularly when it happens very suddenly, knows how hard it can be. This rabbit was one of the most important things in my life, or, as the term “important things” doesn’t do her justice, was one of the beings I value most highly and her presence in my life enriched it immensely. Her loss was tremendous to my wife and I, and one of the things that made it particularly difficult was the sense that our grief would seem sentimental and out-of-proportion to the rest of the world. “After all, she was just a rabbit,” is, if hopefully not a response people would be insensitive enough to say out loud, still something I feel like they might think.
So, as a way of working through this emotional thicket, I offer these reflections on rabbits so that others might understand a little of why I have come to value them so highly. Let me begin with an odd coincidence: my mother sent me this thank you card last Christmas (the 2015 Christmas):

The rabbit content is not the coincidence, the date the card was written on is: January 13^th, 2016. Does it mean anything that the card was written exactly a year before? I don’t think it means anything more than does the fact that she died on a Friday the 13^th—I don’t tend to put much stock in such superstitions.
 
I simply keep the card around because I like the picture on it, and I happened to glance at it recently and was just taken aback when I noticed the date. But let me focus on the card itself and what I like about it, that is what I want to talk about. If you look closely, there are two things to notice: the close snuggling of the two bunnies depicted on it, and the way that there is script overlaid on the bunnies. The fact that the bunnies are snuggling is pretty much par for the course if you know rabbits. If you do, then you know that in addition to being incredible gentle and sensitive creatures, they are also tremendously loving. Watching my two rabbits snuggled up to each other never failed to bring a smile to my face. If I were inclined to anthropomorphize nature as a creative force, I might wonder if rabbits weren’t made such fecund reproducers simply because nature thought it would be a good idea to put as much simple, gentle love in the world as possible. Upon making rabbits and seeing that they were so great, nature decided to make lots more and to keep doing so. (Obviously my perspective varies from those like the Australians, who had to deal with them as invasive species.)

Anyway, that part of the card is cute, but I find the writing on the rabbits to be most symbolically appropriate. Rabbits are relatively silent creatures, you might hear the odd grunt or honk from them, or a thump to indicate danger, or excitement, or emphasis, or maybe a bit of digging or chewing noises, but other than that they are pretty quiet. Despite their silence, they are not unexpressive; far from it, it is just that they rely on physical cues—all kinds of different bodily positions, stances, and orientations, ear positions, how they arrange their feet, the list goes on—to express themselves. For instance, a rabbit who just hops a short distance away from you and turns its back to you has just given you the butt, a indication of the rabbit’s displeasure by way of social shunning (of course, its adorable to us humans, so the pain of this ostracism is pretty bearable).

The upshot of this is that one does, in effect, have to read rabbits. They need to be watched, quietly, patiently, and attentively, for them to open up and reveal the sweet, playful, and mischievous creatures that they are—rabbits have big personalities is you know how to look. If you crowd and rush them then all you will get is a scared and unhappy creature, and never suspect that, under different conditions, that same creature might be the sort to engage in wild, acrobatic leaps just to express an irrepressible joy of living. As you read more and more, the small details begin to add up to something far more significant, both in terms of each detail and for the whole. The quiet exterior of the rabbit, like that of the book, belies the intensity that may lay within. That is the truth contained in that card, and it is for those depths that we knew and loved with our own intensity that we mourn for you, Lucy.