You can talk to a rabbit, but they can't talk back. Right? Wrong! Tigger and Shadow talk back to us all the time with actions and body language, but Portia actually learned a way to talk back to us vocally.

When Portia first came home we noticed she snorted a lot. On her first visit to the vet we asked the vet to check that it wasn't due to a health problem. When the vet found no nasal obstructions or breathing problems, she looked at us and said that it was her opinion that this one of Portia's personality quirks, a means of communicating. Snorty became one of her nicknames.

For the three years that Portia was with us, we would regularly have actual conversations with a rabbit. In talking to Portia, when we would finish what we would had to say, she would snort in response. We found we could have whole back and forth conversations with her little snorted responses inserted into the pauses in our speech.

There were of course the huffy snorts followed by Portia turning her back or hopping away when we had offended her bunny sensibilities. There were also the muffled crying snorts we would get when we had to hold her to be cleaned up or medicated. Portia was always a very vocal bunny. Only death quieted her sweet bunny voice.

~ Rebecca Pullin