Yearly Vet Visit for Leo the Lionhead

Rabbit & VetSo first thing this morning we were off with Leo to the vet for a yearly well visit exam. His first two visits a year ago were a check up for his health right after we adopted him and then to have his neuter surgery. Thankfully Leo has been a very healthy bunny since then and did not need to see the vet this past year for anything.

The vet we had taken him too initially had moved away from our area, so we needed to set Leo up with a new vet. We figured the new vet and staff would love him as they are quite fond of rabbits. The vet is new to Leo, but someone we had seen with Tigger, Shadow and Portia for many visits during their lives. As expected, the troll doll mop of Leo’s was a huge hit and could not be resisted by vet and staff. So Leo got lots of head pets which hopefully made the poking and prodding just a wee bit more acceptable.

Leo weighs in with an adult weight of 4.2 pounds and is in good health. The biggest challenge the vet sees is making sure he eats enough hay for roughage and has good grooming to help prevent any hairballs forming in his tummy. We figured this would be the case and had questions about what would be the best diet for him and amounts of things based on his ideal size. The vet feels Leo is at the right weight. Since he isn’t a super active little bunny, we need to keep an eye on fattening foods and treats he likes being minimal amounts so that he doesn’t gain too much weight.

Each rabbit brings their own challenges to their humans based on the rabbit’s individual personal likes and dislikes. Grooming is high on Leo’s list of activities to be avoided and he makes sure I know how much he hates it by either whimpering or chattering his teeth no matter how gentle I am.  So will have to practice tough love about that and hope at some point Leo will reach a bit more acceptance of it. It is also going to be a bit tricky trying to evaluate if he is eating enough hay, since he likes to eat his hay in private when no one is watching him. The vet had suggested a measurement system. Leo does seem to like to eat hay when he is lying around, so I am thinking I will be following him around putting handfuls of hay wherever he flops to have it handy as a snack and then have a log of how many handfuls he eats per day. It was easier with Tigger and Shadow as we could have a hay bin and they hopped in and ate away not caring if we watched and we could tell how much they were eating pretty easily. Leo is more secretive.

 I thought I would take this opportunity to share some good articles from the House Rabbit Society about vet visits and help with paying vet bills:

Tomorrow the plan for November …

 

 

Video Share: Thumper Doesn’t Want to Play

This for me is a wonderful video find.  My first rabbit experience was with Thumper, a black and white Dutch Miniature my father brought home for our family.  This video is of another black and white Dutch Miniature, also named Thumper.  If we had video when we had our Thumper, I could picture getting the same response if we had wanted him to play for the camera.

If the video isn’t working properly here, a link to it on YouTube: Thumper Doesn’t Want to Play

Learning About Lionheads

Leo the Lionhead's ManesSo before we had Leo, I had seen some pictures of Lionhead rabbits and knew they had manes. I also knew they could be single or double maned, but had no idea what that actually meant. Seeing Leo’s picture and then seeing him in person, I thought the mop of fur between his ears was super cute, but he didn’t have the thick ruff of mane around the head that I had seen with some Lionheads. You can see in the top picture what I mean. Except for the between the ears mop, his fur was pretty short.

In the time we have had Leo, I have learned that cute mop of fur between his ears is also called a “fringe” or “wool cap”. Whatever you call it, it just always reminds me of the hair on a troll doll. I loved playing with those troll doll mops of hair. Messing with Leo’s fringe of fur is just as much fun. He doesn’t mind because it means he is getting his head petted which he loves.

Leo was thought to be a year and a half old when we got him. We learned pretty quickly that could not have been true. First, the teenage hormones hit with a bang within days of bringing him home. Second over the first two months we had him, he was still growing. Leo didn’t have his adult fur coat until a few months later. You can see in the second picture that Leo in addition to that mop between the ears now has the around the face mane too. His isn’t as pronounced or thick as some I have seen in pictures of other Lionheads, but it is there now.

After he got his adult coat, I noticed what seemed to me like a strange fur growth pattern where the fur from his waist and around his behind on low on his sides had grown to where it was dragging on the floor. It looked weird to me since the fur along his backbone and to the sides of his backbone was much shorter. I was describing this on Etherbun and that is when I learned that Leo is double maned. I had assumed that a double mane must mean a thicker or second-growth of fur around the head. In reality, a double maned Lionhead has a mane around the head and a “skirt” of fur that runs around the lower sides and back of the body from waist to waist. Skirt is actually a very good description of that fur.  You can see in the last two pictures how the skirt can really hide his tail and feet.

So living with Leo has been a bit more challenging than we had expected. Since the shelter thought he was over a year old, we thought the fur coat we were getting in the first picture was the adult fur coat. We weren’t expecting all the fur in the lower pictures. The Lionhead coat has some decided challenges. First the shedding is awesome with little poofs of white fur floating around everywhere. I’m thankful I’m not allergic to rabbit fur.

That skirt mane is the second challenge.  The skirt drags everything around it comes in contact with. It is like having a living, breathing Swiffer broom in action. Everything on the floor he comes in contact with gets moved around all over the place and deposited where he stops. So little piles of fur, hay, paper or cardboard he has chewed off of boxes, all get swept up by the skirt and then redistributed all around the room. If my living Swiffer could learn how to deposit what he gathers up straight to a trash can, cleaning would be so much easier.

I’ve found that a weekly comb out of Leo is necessary.  His head mane and body fur on his back are usually in good shape, but the skirt mane is another story. The skirt tends to get tangled and sometimes holds on to bits of hay. If not attended to on a weekly basis, it would start to clump up and begin to form fur mats.  He begins to feel like he is attempting to grow multiple tails on his hind end.

Leo is not a happy camper about the grooming. He really hates it and no matter how gently I do it, he starts off with the heavy breathing, bugged out eye look the minute he is picked up for it. If he has some tangled areas, it can take a few minutes to gently work through them and he will sometimes start a pitiful crying sound which makes it really hard to keep grooming him. I am hoping he will grow more accustomed to handling over time. Tigger would do the same thing when very little, chattering her teeth when we had to do things for grooming or medications. As she got older, she finally seemed to realize that we weren’t seeking to harm her every time we picked her up. She still didn’t like it, but at least she stopped with the chattering teeth.

Leos Lionhead status is clear when looking at his two manes. My understanding is that a double mane Lionhead needs to have both parents be Lionheads. What confuses me though is that Leo’s adult size is above and beyond the size of most Lionheads. He was three and half pounds when we got him. Since Lionheads are not usually above four pounds that was one reason we at first thought the shelter might have his age set right. However, Leo was still growing and is now somewhere in the four to five pound range. So I am not sure if he had some recessive gene for a bigger size than normal.   We appear to have a giant Lionhead. It is kind of weird to be thinking that because Leo is a small rabbit.  He is just very very big for a Lionhead rabbit.

When Leo hens up to sleep, he has a bit of a fluffy marshmallow with chocolate sauce look which is so cute. I haven’t caught a picture of him like that yet and will have to try for one in the future. One thing is for certain and that is that his fur is the softest rabbit fur we have ever felt.  Previous rabbits Portia and Shadow were both fur breeds. Portia’s Chinchilla fur was soft due to its thickness. Shadow’s fur was Havana and it was the satin sheen of his fur that was notable. Tigger who was not a fur breed actually had the softest to the touch fur because it was such a baby fine fur. Leo beats out Tigger having even softer fur. It also amazes me the whiteness of his fur and in spite of dragging his skirt around everywhere just how clean the fur stays. I guess Leo and I together do a good job of keeping him well-groomed.

Later this week Leo is scheduled to have his yearly check up with a new vet. I’m going to see if she has any better suggestions for making his grooming routine more acceptable to him.

Rabbittude Buntique Featured on Zibbet

Rabbittude Buntique Featured Seller on ZibbetThis week our Rabbittude Buntique shop is the featured shop on the Zibbet blog. It is a real honor for us. It is wonderful to have been warmly welcomed into the community on Zibbet.

We look forward to having a good future growing along with Zibbet. We regard our expansion to Zibbet as a an extension of our commitment to continue to support handmade and small indie businesses. We feel that helping the support and growth of a venue committed to micro businesses is an important step in helping those individual businesses to continue in the future to have choices of places to sell that are a good fit and profitable.

Link to our interview: http://www.zibbet.com/blog/2013.10.28/featured-zibbeter-rabbittudebuntique

Sweet Bunny Faces

Sweet Leo's FaceThis is a close up of Leo’s face.  It is hard looking at his sweet little face to understand how someone gave him up to a city animal shelter and just walked away from him.

Right from the time I first saw Leo’s face on Petfinder.com, I wanted to meet him. His little face is a lot furrier now than when I first saw it. The shelter thought he was 1 1/2 years old, but that could not have been true, because he was still growing after we got him. He hadn’t reached his full size and didn’t have his adult fur coat until a few months after we brought him home. His fur was a great deal shorter when we first got him a year ago.  He has fluffed out and that sweet face is even cuter now.

Leo like Shadow absolutely loves to have his head petted which is a good thing because that cute face and troll doll mop of fur on his head are hard to resist.  It is so cute when I am petting him and my hand strays to his back or the side of his face and he will burrow his head back under my hand and bump up against my palm with his head, giving the clear message, “Pet my head, my head, my head!”. It is another shade of Shadow when he does that. Shadow too liked head pets best and did the same thing with burrowing his head under my hand and then giving my palm the bump up.

It is so nice to have another sweet little bunny boy around the house.

Cute Bunny Behaviors – A Video Share

To help you over the midweek hump, here is a cute bunny video.  In this video Billy’s humans have compiled and pulled together video of all his ways of just being a cute house rabbit. Just in case the video isn’t working properly here, a link to it on YouTube: Cute Bunny Behaviors

Shades of Shadow

Leo and baby gateWhat is it with boy bunnies and labels? I will never forget the ripping noise I heard one time in the office and turned to see Shadow pulling off the adhesive labels I had on a set of storage drawers.  I had to run to wrestle the labels away from him before he tried to consume the plastic with its adhesive backing.

So recently I hear Leo chewing at the baby gate and turn around to find him sitting up on his hind legs chewing at a spot on the side of the gate about a foot off the floor. I’m thinking, “Okay what is so interesting a foot off the floor as opposed to the part by the floor?”  I went to look and there was an adhesive warning label stuck to the side of the gate.  I hadn’t really noticed it because except for the text, the label was colored similarly to the gate. It didn’t really stand out to me. However, like Shadow before him, Leo had noticed the label and was trying to pull it off.  Fortunately for me, the label on the baby gate was not so easy to pull off as the label tape I had used on the files that Shadow had gone after.

Unfortunately it turned out there were other hidden to human eyes labels in the office.  I didn’t realize there were still labels stuck on the undersides of chairs, but Leo did. There were more ripping sessions and I had to take those away from him and spend some time on the floor staring up at the undersides of things to see what else he just might see that would be in reach of his little bunny teeth.

I am going to have to think if there is something safe I can give Leo or do for him that will be similar to finding things in unexpected places  for him to “steal”.

 

A Plan for Leo – Part III

Leo and the hideawayOn Friday I wrote that Leo’s new deluxe cardboard hideaway had arrived from BusyBunny.com. Given his strong reaction of fear, I wasn’t sure how long it might be before we could say whether the new hideaway was a hit or a miss. We tried draping one of his blankies over the door in one end to see if that would make the road to acceptance a bit smoother. So the blankie is serving as a tent flap entryway on one end of the hideaway.

As you can see in this image, Leo has understood and accepted the concept of the hideaway now.  My thought and plan had been for the hideaway to be tucked under the back side of the desk where it had measured as a perfect fit. You can see that Leo had other ideas. Once he started to realize the possibilities of this hideaway, he decided he didn’t like the location of it and pushed it out.  I tried pushing it back in a bit so that it wouldn’t stick out so far into the walking space of the room and Leo pushed it out again. His moving efforts actually flipped the whole hideaway over a couple times.

Leo has made it clear that he wants hideaway space inside the hideaway and behind it. I will just have to adjust to having a little less walking space behind the desk. He has already staked out this one corner area as a place he likes to hang out and chill. It is amazing sometimes how quickly rabbits can claim new spaces as theirs. I realized this morning that Leo had fully accepted it. When I let him out of his cage in the morning, usually he likes to be petted for a few minutes before taking off for his free roaming bunny pursuits. However, this morning, he wanted no part of hanging around to be petted. When I opened the door to his cage, he dived out and headed straight for the hideaway.

Tomorrow a post on how Leo has shades of Shadow …

A Plan for Leo – Part II

Leo the Lionhead and his boxEarlier this month I wrote about how we had ordered the  Deluxe Hopper Hideaway from Busy Bunny. They were on vacation when we ordered, with orders to ship again beginning this week. Well, Leo’s new hideaway arrived today.

All has not gone exactly according to how we had hoped, but is kind of going according to what we expected. Leo is really good for channeling a freak out personality similar to Tigger. The whole time the hideaway was being put together, Leo was hiding in a corner of the room and starting at every noise.

It is now in place where his little box stood, but I don’t dare try to take any pictures yet. He has hopped in, checked it out, chinned it and nibbled at it a bit.  However, when he hops away from it to another part of the room, it is like he forgets he was just there and it was okay and he is scared that his space is different. We are dealing with lots of hiding out, thumping and scrambling runs for cover if anybody moves too suddenly or makes unexpected noises.

Hopefully there will be a happy ending Part III in the near future where we can share an image of Leo enjoying his new hideaway …

More Dust Bunnies Are On the March!

Dust Bunnies Bumper Sticker

On sale in our CafePress shop now!

A few months back, there was a comment that putting our marching dust bunnies on a bumper sticker would be a great idea. I missed that when it was first posted, but found it recently. It was one of those that is a terrific idea, why didn’t I think of it moments. Today I had the opportunity to create the bumper sticker and the Dust Bunny Bumper sticker is now available in our CafePress shop as a single, a 10 pack or a 50 pack of bumper stickers.

It is wonderful when people contact us through the website or our shops and ask if we can do something based on other things that we have. Many times those are good ideas for things that we can easily do, we just didn’t think of it. So we really appreciate suggestions and questions about whether something is possible.

Some new products we create and occasionally a whole line begins with a suggestion or question from a follower or potential customer. We really appreciate hearing what people think or would like. Sometimes I’ve had beads hiding in a drawer waiting for an idea and someone’s question or comment about what they would like to see for jewelry or an accessory helps me to realize how the beads were meant to be used.

So thank you all for being so wonderful asking questions, providing feedback and suggestions. We appreciate that so much!

Fun Video Share

This was a fun video find. Enjoy it as a light moment for a bunny rabbit assist in getting over the midweek hump day. I had no idea that a rabbit might carry a stuffed toy around like a puppy would. So cute! It shows me once again that each rabbit has different personalities, likes and dislikes. Because of that, each new rabbit can be full of surprises and seeing and finding out new and unexpected things from each of them. It is really fun to get to know and see different bunnies and what they will think to do!

Just in case the video isn’t working properly here, a link to it on YouTube: Best Friends Video

Treasured Tuesday – Rabbit Transit – Bunnies On the Move

Bunny Bungalow

Photo © BusyBunny.com

More of Shadow hiding in plain sight

Arrow points to Shadow hiding inside

shadow-gallery-8

I’m waiting …

This is a blast from the past today since it looks like the Bunny Bungalow has been discontinued. The first image is from one of Busy Bunny’s old catalog pages. We found the Bungalow early on with Tigger and Shadow.

They loved this as a hideout and play area. But they also re purposed the use of this. They liked to have this be a bunny bus.  Shadow in particular loved to hop inside and have us carry him somewhere else in the bunny bus. Sometimes they would both hop in together and just wait there looking at us until we would go and pick the box up making sure that we carried it slowly and close to the ground just in case somebunny decided to make an unexpected departure.

Tigger and Shadow hated to be picked up and held and carried around.  But they were very calm and easy-going when we would give them their bus rides, waiting until the box came to a stop on the ground before disembarking. It seems that having their feet on a floor made a difference to how they felt about being picked up and moved. With the Bunny Bungalow as bus, their chosen rabbit transit, they actively sought to be moving around  in it at times.

Sometimes at night, Shadow would get a bunny bus ride to his cage.  There were evenings he was really avoiding going back in his cage for the night. He would hop all around evading us and then he would hop in to the Bunny Bungalow. We would pick it up, take it to his cage and place one of the openings at his door. If Shadow was in good behavior mode, he would hop in for the night. If he was in bad behavior mode, he would escape out one of the other doors in the bus and we would have to begin again. Sometimes he got a number of bus rides before he decided to call it a night.