Now that the Yuletide holidays are over, I can finally get
back to the tale of 3 bunnies I wasn’t sure I knew what I was going to do with.
After their first disastrous litters and me feeling
generally like a horrible human and general failure, I ordered 3 very nice
cages online. By the time they were shipped to me, my husband very kindly put
up my small hoophouse and I had decided to keep them in there for the winter. For
the most part, rabbits do very nicely outdoors in the winter but the critical
part is to keep them dry and draft free. I figured the hoophouse was a pretty
good option for those winter requirements.
To be clear, I don’t have a full size hoophouse in my city
lot. It’s just a 5 x 10 raised bed that my husband screwed a PVC tubing skeleton
to. It’s basically a spine with ribs arrangement that we cover with plastic and
tack down at the bottom for season extension.
The real stroke of genius about putting the bunnies in here was
altering the cages after they came to pull out their included manure tray. This
allowed the bunny waste to fall down to the floor of the hoophouse, exactly
where I would have had to shovel it anyway as fertilizer in the spring. I’ve
always loved the way pasture stackers like Joel Saladin consider not just where
they want the animals, but where they want the manure and how to get it there
without work, and it was gratifying to put this into action.
Knowing that my lady bunnies were likely going to have their
babies in the next few days, all the information I gathered said that it was
time to add a nest box and fill it with cozy hay for them. It had also been much
colder here than it usually is in November.
So the night I bought them, I went out to the hoophouse to
get everything all set up. Clara, my more docile bunny, was farthest back in
the enclosure and I dragged the nest boxes and straw back there to get started
on hers first. Based on what I had read, if I put the nest box in there, she
would explore it, line it with her soft fur pulled from her belly, and birth
her kits warm and soft in about 4 more days. Plenty of time according to
everything I had read. Bunnies gestate 30-31 days.
I opened Clara’s cage top that 20 degree November night to
put in the nest box and she never hopped or moved. Instead, she grunted and a
hairless, bloody baby bunny was born. Oh shit! Only 26 days!
I had my husband’s light coat on for evening chores and it
was a good thing because the baby would have died of exposure in just a few minutes. I picked the wiggling little thing up and put
him in my coat pocket…and zipped it closed. You’d be surprised how much
it was squirming around 1 minute after birth! I also had read that domesticated rabbit mamas rarely
rejected a baby due to human scent, especially if it was the scent of their
regular caretaker. Phew, one less thing to worry about.
Long story short, after a quick discussion with my husband,
we decided to bring both momma bunnies in their cages down into our unfinished
basement while they had their babies. It was the only way I could be sure I
could help them if needed and that they would be warm enough while I waited for
nature to kick in and motivate them to care for their babies. I carefully got
them settled and put the cozy baby back in the nest box with Clara.
In the meantime, she had 1 more baby, sadly stillborn. I
quickly did some online reading and most information said she would be all done
or the babies would be dead if there was a long pause between births. Shit
again. There was more blood in the bottom of her cage than I thought there
would be and she still wasn’t making a nest for the baby
recently freed from my pocket. I decided to collect some wool roving I had for
knitting and fluff it around the baby to keep it warm and hope
for the best. By this time it was 11 PM. I waiting another 30 minutes with no more
babies and no change in her ignoring the sole survivor in the fluffy nest I made
for it. I went to bed worried and sad, not sure if she would care for the baby or
if she was even going to live.
This seems like a good time to talk about the whole concept
of eating animals, raising the ones you are going to eat yourself, and why
caring for them does not preclude a thoughtful person from eating them. I’ll illustrate
some of my thoughts with a recent conversation I had with a vegetarian friend.
She is a thoughtful person and a good friend of mine, but perhaps not without
her own ideas about why what I was doing didn’t make sense to her. Basically,
she had a hard time listening to me talking about my care of the rabbits
without challenging me about later eating of them. I know there are lots of
people who feel this way and I completely understand.
I don’t profess to
know how this is all going to turn out, or even what I will and will not be
able to do with regards to dispatching, butchering, and consuming the bunnies. I
might not be able to kill them, clean them and then eat them, and I know even
if I can do this list of things that I believe to be important life skills, I
will not do it without some sadness and maybe other feelings I can’t foresee
right now.
What I do know, without a shadow of a doubt, is that a
thoughtful person can care deeply for the raising and care of an animal, can be
fully invested and responsible for any outcomes, and still be satisfied with
eating them. It is possible to have a marriage between those things and they
don’t have to be mutually exclusive. It’s not to say that all of those feelings
will rest easy all the time together. The older I get, the more I believe that
it’s part of Life’s point to have things rub against each other; to be uneasy sometimes
and further, that these are the things we shouldn’t shy away from if we can
help it. They deserve some exploration. That is the belief that I am operating
under. I hope it proves to be true.
I woke up in the morning and went immediately down to the
basement. It was dark and I was glad I had brought a flashlight. When I
hunkered down and shined it in Clara’s cage, her bright pink eyes shined back
at me from her corner where she was calmly cleaning her feet. In her nest box
were a half dozen squirming babies, carefully covered in the fur she had plucked
from her belly. They were hairless, pink, and lovely, at least to me.
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