In the Rabbit Room
Posted on November 14, 2011 Posted by John Scalzi 26 Comments
We’ve had a spate of sub-freezing nights recently (although today is positively balmy at 60+ degrees), so we decided that it was time for Cthulhu, Lord Snuggleston, to come inside for the winter. Fortunately, we happen to have a spare room in the basement that will serve His Eldritch Fluffiness’ needs. Here it is. You will see that he has the run of the room, and that we are bringing in other pets to acclimatize them to each other — although we do keep the bunny in the cage when we’re not down there, since I’m still not entirely convinced the cats are going to be as benign toward him as Daisy is. Be that as it may, having one’s own private room is definitely a step up from the carny cage from whence this rabbit was sprung. I hope he appreciates it, in his rabbitty way.
My younger cat THOUGHT she was going to pick a fight with our wabbit. Flopsy, in all of her cuteness, was having none of it and beat Lulu’s ass. Lulu has learned that bunnies will kick you in the face if you fuck with them, and now steers clear.
He will show His eternal, dreadful gratitude by eating and pooping every single day.
Hey, looks like there’s plenty of room for company! You could get him like a Shub-Wigglesrath, the Black Bunny with a Thousand Yo…
Yeah, okay. Bad idea.
The human mind will shatter when The Bringer of Hoppity Horror twitches its Giant, Evil Nose in appreciation.
Are you aware that since naming the bunny, there have been unintelligible posts appearing on Whatever in the middle of the night? I try to read them with the intent of telling you about them, but next thing I know, I wake up in the morning with carrot scrapings lodged under my fingernails. That’s when I go back to Whatever to see what the previous night’s post said, but they’re never there in the morning.
My dad had a cat and a rabbit living together for years. But it wasn’t an amicable relationship. We were always a little suspicious of the bunny’s death…
I think keeping the rabbit and cats separate is a good idea.
We found that our cats quickly learned to keep their distance from male rabbits. Male bunnies seem to have a minimal skills in selecting potential mates.
So this is what R’lyeh looks like. Brighter than I expected. More mirrors, too.
@Jack Lint:
Yeah. More mirrors, less cyclopean.
Your going through an awful lot to fatten him up for dinner… :P
I approve. He has his cage for feeling safe, and I assume you let him out fairly often.
As for cats and rabbits living together, I’ve got a sibling pair. If you separate them for more than an afternoon, they both get mopey. (When the cat had to spend two nights at the vet’s, I thought the bunny was going to make herself ill so she could be there too.) The bunny decided the cat was going to be her sister. The cat had no say, of course. But they are the best of friends.
But my bunny takes no shit. We’ve got new kittens in the house, and they are quickly learning to FEAR HER. She doesn’t come out of my room, but if they try to come in, she will charge them, headbutt them, kick them, and generally be a jerk til they get out. She’ll do it to anyone who isn’t human, as well. Our pit mix is terrified of her because OMG THE PLUSH TOY KICKED ME. The safer they feel, the more determined they will be to defend themselves and their place. I fully expect Lord Snuggleston will take his place as animal-alpha in the household within two months.
Glad to see a bunny post!! And um….. a little tip ……. you might want to put something in the cage for bunny to sit on. Wire mesh isn’t kind to feet or bunny butts. I got a big ceramic tile from Home Depot when I had my bunny in a cage (years and years ago —- my bunnies have their own room now) — and she loved being able to sit on something solid. :)
hey! What the hell! These aren’t raisins! (ptew)
I notice the bunny hasn’t eaten your molding . . . yet.
How the cat/rabbit thing plays out has a lot to do with their personalities. Could the rabbit been a member of the Owsla previously?
As for how the rabbit thinks of you I would assume you are the embodiment of the Frith.
Stranger than my remembering those, while enjoying evening silflay is that I really didn’t enjoy Watership Down that much.
Our Maine Coon, Fantasia, and our Angora buck, Attila The Bun, were best buddies. But, yeah, look out for baseboard damage – and get the cables out of reach.
Speaking from sad experience, bunnies left alone in a room without supervision will quickly eat all of your molding. Of course, my bunny might just have been peeved at being named Herpes instead of Cthulhu….
Rabbits make great house pets, as long as you don’t mind picking up the odd raisin. We also gave ours the run of the garden, but we made sure we got a breed big enough to chase the cats and crows. Our french lop made sure no cats lingered in our garden.
When I was a kid, I had a pet desert cottontail–Fuzzy. My father rescued it from dogs that had gotten into the nest (whatever rabbits live in). Even though we got her as a tiny, baby, fed her with a bottle, etc., she remained wild. Because she was a wild animal. But she, in the weird manner of many animals, was extremely tolerant of me, a child. During the day, the rabbit had the run of the house because my mom had heard somewhere that a wild rabbit, when kept in a cage, would become paralyzed.
Anyway, that rabbit, though tiny, was mean. She terrorized our dachshund, who was otherwise a ferocious hunter. One kick of those hind legs opened up a huge gash in my father’s arm.
Never underestimate an angry rabbit. :)
(And yeah, Fuzzy ate molding. She also shredded the back of the couch.)
I’ve read accounts of how tiny Netherland Dwarfs have terrorized entire households when Their Human went away for a protracted period. This included cats, dogs, and Stuff On The Wall Below Three Feet.
We’ve recently realized that the reason we haven’t had mice in the house until this year was because of the bunnies. I actually saw Usagi-bun take out after a mouse once, and both he and Salem would mysteriously start thumping in the middle of the night. We could never find any sign of raccoons or other prowlers outside…um, now we think rabbit heard a mouse and started thumping at it.
Usagi was the terror of the neighborhood cats. Hey, they had fur and He Wanted a Doe. But I have a picture sequence from the 4-H show days where Usagi faced down and intimidated a cat. Both were leashed, but the cat was much, much more worried about Usagi than Usagi was about the cat.
Dominant, alpha rabbits tend to try to rule the world around them. And then there’s the YouTube video of the rabbit who took out after a snake…and treed the snake.
This reminds me of a site I once found long ago in the days of yore:
http://language.rabbitspeak.com/
It’s a cute guide to understanding rabbit body language and being able to “communicate” with them at a closer level. Glad your bunny and various other animals are doing well together!
Rabbits are such great pets. I endorse having a tile in the cage for bunny to chill on, because the grid can be hard to sit and stand on indefinitely. Also– their teeth never stop growing. While they are not afflicted with monstrously growing teeth as beavers are, rabbit-human companionship may be aided by the provision of such chewing alternatives as old phone books, the paperbacks of your enemies, small cardboard boxes packed with junk mail, and, if your daughter does martial arts, broken boards. Furthermore: why do manufacturers make cords and cables so goddamned tasty? Anyway, Lord S is adorable.
I can see Cthulu yelling to the other bunnies, “Come back you fools! Dogs aren’t dangerous!” which, for some reason, is one of my all time favorite literary quotes
and then cthulhu jumped into the water and attacked Jimmy Carter who was in a boat..
Buns are excellent pets for writers, as they’re litterbox trainable and don;t make much noise…except when they start playing with their jingly toys. :) Ditto on putting something on the floor of the cage–a spare piece of linoleum would also work well at keeping His Highness from getting sore hocks. And my buns love cardboard boxes and the big tubes for pouring concrete footings to play in.
Always good to be cautious, supervising the pets when they’re together. I still don’t trust our cats to leave our male rabbit alone, because they still occasionally get a kick in the face from those big back legs, and I figure they deserve it.