International Rabbit Day 2014 Is Coming!

International Rabbit Day 2014

I first learned about International Rabbit Day a few years ago.  Someone sent me a link to the website Holiday Insights with information about how the day started and the intent to promote the well-being of rabbits.  It is usually set for the Fourth Saturday or Sunday in September. Holiday Insights has the date listed for Saturday this year which would be the 27th.

I see that House Rabbit Society is planning on Sunday the 28th for observing International Rabbit Day. I say why not make it an International Rabbit Weekend and focus some attention on our big eared friends for both days.

Here is one suggestion for observing the day/s:  “Celebrate this special day with your pet rabbit. Learn a little more about him and how to properly care for his needs. If you don’t have a pet, maybe today is the day to get a pet rabbit! ”  Visit the Holiday Insights page for more information on the meaning and origin of International Rabbit Day.

 

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 …

A Plan for Leo

Leo the Lionhead and his boxOn Saturday, I shared a gallery of images of Leo with his blankie in his pen. This is Leo in his little cardboard box that is on the back side of one of the office desks. Now that is a cozy hiding spot for him and we make it even cozier at times by draping one of his blankies over it to serve as a doorway similar to a tent flap doorway.

However, Leo has some expansion coming to that space.  I was surfing around the internet looking at bunny products and saw that the Busy Bunny is on vacation. They have a notice that all orders placed now while they are on vacation will get a 10% discount and then the orders will ship after they return from vacation. So orders placed now will start shipping the week of October 14th. Any discount is helpful and that decided me to look and see what they might have that Leo might like.

The Deluxe Hopper Hideaway is now on order for Leo and will be here in just a couple of weeks for him to have greatly expanded cardboard hideaway housing:

The two cardboard houses are joined by a tunnel in between – the houses have openings on all four sides in which additional tunnels can be inserted. The tunnels notch securely into the houses, and have a swinging door in the middle for more run-through fun.

Leo will be tripling his space on the back side of the desk. His new little hideaway will fill that space. Once we have it in place, we will try to share a picture of him hopefully enjoying it. Sometimes things we buy for Leo are complete misses. He is a very different rabbit in some of his likes and dislikes compared to Tigger, Shadow and Portia.  Anyway, since The Busy Bunny has that sale in place now, it is a good time to check out if they have any products that your bunny might like. They have hideaways and tunnels in cardboard and willow. Their willow rings are a chew toy that Tigger and Shadow absolutely loved, Shadow in particular. Portia was more fond of willow balls and not the rings.  Leo also prefers the willow balls to the chew rings.

More bunny stories to come this week as well as info on what is going on in the Rabbittude studio …

 

Whats Up With Rabbittude …

I have been MIA here for a while and it has been a combination of things.  The fall allergy season is a tricky one for me and sometimes leaves me drained and down or dealing with sleeplessness due to sinus pressure.  Next year, I need to get blog posts written ahead to make things easier on myself to keep on track.  However, this year was more than just seasonal allergies.  The end of the allergy season coincided with the six month anniversary of losing Tigger and Shadow.  That hit a bit harder than expected, especially so since one of our early friends we met after getting Tigger and Shadow was Jean and her bunny Acorn.  Acorn was also eleven years old and in failing health this past year.  I am sad to say that he too is now gone.  So I will get back to writing some stories soon and include a tribute to Acorn in that.

Leo has been keeping me company in the office on a daily basis and we are growing to know each other better.  He is a close to the vest bunny rabbit, not letting all his likes and dislikes and personality all hang out.  It will be an uncovering of the layers of Leo over time.  One thing though is quite clear, he is a sweetie and that makes it hard to understand how someone else could have given him up.

To keep my hands busy and still some sad thoughts for a time while still showing my love of rabbits, I have been doing a lot of creating with my hoard of bunny beads over this past couple months. Most of those items have been listed in our Etsy Buntique shop if you are looking for something rabbit themed for yourself or another rabbit lover. The showcase here has just a few of the items available.  We have a special going on starting tomorrow through next Monday, free US shipping and reduced shipping prices to locations outside the US.

I will start to write bunny stories again during this next week, now that things are getting back to normal again and I am catching up to schedule again.

Where’s Leo?

Where is little Leo?Okay, so this isn’t the planned topic.  Blame it on Leo who threw my game plan off today by displaying some of his personal flavor of rabbittude.  You can see in the picture we have created a really roomy exercise pen for him with some wire cube kits and cable ties.

The pen is just under 4 feet by 5 feet in size.  There is plenty of room for a willow tunnel, food and water bowls, straw mats, toys, his favorite blanky, his corner litter box in the far corner of this picture and he still has lots of run around room.  So where is Leo?  Leo was running around the office, in and out of his exercise pen and burrowing under the sheet that we have draped along the one side that is between his exercise pen and a file cabinet.  We have a piece of cardboard on the floor under that drapped sheet for him to chew on and dig at.  I heard him for quite some time digging at things inside and outside of his exercise pen.

Then the sound changed somewhat and I knew I needed to find out what Leo was up to.  No Leo in his pen, no Leo under the sheet.  I am hearing him in the area of the pen, but no Leo anywhere in sight.  Now sometimes Leo disappears by burrowing underneath his blanky, but not this time.  I am hearing him digging and chewing at something right in the area of his pen and cannot see him anywhere at all.

Then it slowly dawned on me that in spite of what we had tried to do to block of his access to wiggle behind the pen that is exactly where he had managed to go.  Leo was now in the far corner behind his pen, behind his corner little box.  So I could hear him, but not see him.  He is small enough that he hadn’t even really pushed the pen that much out from the wall with his wiggling in.  We had a bit of a disagreement about his coming back out.  I got that rabbit look more than once as he would start towards me and then back up again.  I guess he realized I was serious about coming after him, so he grudgingly came back out on his own.  Once I got him out, he was trying to wiggle back into the space he had created the whole time I was trying to find a way to truly block it off this time.

So I am trying to rig a fix and while I am doing it, I am pulling Leo out, trying again, pulling Leo out again.  I was working to fix another little wall with cable ties that would extend from the pen and insert behind the file cabinet so he would not have a way to be able to wiggle behind the pen again.  I think I had to pull him back out and shoo him away at least six times before I was successful in hooking up that new wall.  At least I think I was successful.  It is amazing what a rabbit can do and where they can go if they are motivated enough.

Sometimes I think Leo is a quieter less active rabbit than Tigger and Shadow.   It still may be way too soon to know that for sure though.  We don’t know what he was used to or able to do in his previous home.  We don’t know how he was treated.  So we don’t know how comfortable or confident he felt in the past to really show his true bunny personality.  It is quite possible that little Leo might be getting ready to provide some real challenges if he is now beginning to feel comfy and secure enough here to let loose with some rabbittude Leo style.

I promise no Leo delays will prevent more of the story Friday on living with multiple rabbit encampments …

An Adorable Rabbit Video


Google translator is telling me the title might be In Amefaji baby care?  In case the video doesn’t work here is the link to it: http://youtu.be/lwM92P8aT64

I apologize for not posting last week, allergies got the best of me.  The fall season has always been a rough one for me. Between congestion, dizziness, sleep issues and antihistamine brain fog, sometimes it is hard to keep on track.  I spent a lot of time walking into rooms last week only to realize when I got there that I had already forgotten why I was going there.  I’ve made note on my calendar for next year to write some September blogging posts in August, just in case.

To get back on schedule, coming Wednesday … living with multiple rabbit encampments …

 

Plan Ahead for International Rabbit Day 2012

International Rabbit Day 2012

Until last year, I didn’t know that anyone had designated a day to think about rabbits other than the obvious, Easter, which can be a very bad day for live rabbits who go to homes unprepared for their daily longterm care.  Then someone sent me a link to the website Holiday Insights with information about how the day started and the intent to promote the well-being of rabbits.  It is usually set for the Fourth Saturday in September which would be the 22nd this year.

Here is one suggestion for the day:  “Celebrate this special day with your pet rabbit. Learn a little more about him and how to properly care for his needs. If you don’t have a pet, maybe today is the day to get a pet rabbit! ”  Visit the Holiday Insights page for more information on the meaning and origin of International Rabbit Day.

The Etsy Rabbits team is planning to get the word out that the day exists by creating treasuries (Etsy member curated showcases) during September showcasing rabbit themes, items and the shops of Etsy Rabbits team members.  There are currently over 300 members of the team from countries around the world.  Most have shops on Etsy, but those who have buyer accounts on Etsy are welcome to join too. If you love to buy or create bunny rabbit themed items or items for rabbits, check out the team.  Members of the team love living rabbits and many members have one or more big eared friends at home.  Some members are actively involved with assisting rabbit rescue groups.  I will post some links to treasuries soon as more get going creating them and will be creating some treasuries myself.

On Friday, the first story of how we first met Portia bunny rabbit …

Leo the Leg Man

Leo is a leg man

A slight change of plan here to keep this post brief.  Until little Leo’s hormones finally calm down, I need to start scheduling my writing time for his nap time.  Usually, I have been writing after Blaine gets home from work so that he can distract Leo from his pursuit of me.  Unfortunately, Blaine has come down sick with a cold / flu today and has been sleeping most of the day.

It is now two weeks since Leo’s neuter, but his hormones are still raging.  Leo is a leg man, an arm man, an anything he can reach rabbit man.  My legs are getting cramped trying to keep them up out of his way and he is at times chewing on my chair in frustration.

Leo at the moment is a poster bunny for why a house rabbit needs to be neutered.  We are thinking that the reason we were given for his being turned in to the shelter (owners working long hours) might not have been the whole truth of the matter.  Or he may be much younger than was thought and just hit the full hormonal burst right as we adopted him.  Any way you look at it though, the love bites that accompany Leo’s rabbit embrace are quite painful if I fail to evade him.  This really isn’t an ideal way to start off our bonding process.  We are glad to have rescued him, but so sad it was necessary because so many don’t properly understand the needs of a house rabbit.  Our vet told us it would take 1-2 months for his hormones to settle down.  I am guessing it is going to be the  full 2 months at this rate.

Gotta go for now, but I will make sure to finish the story on the diagnosis and the long road to recovery for Shadow and get that posted tomorrow …

Leo the Lionhead – Update

Leo ready to pounce if those toes start to come down ...

Leo ready to pounce if those toes start to come down ...

I had intended to tell a Shadow story today, but Leo is making it impossible.  I had written an introduction last week of Leo and his unexpected intact status.  We took him in for his neuter surgery last Thursday.  He came through the surgery and is on the road to recovery now.  However, he seems to have had a huge surge of hormones right before the surgery which has us and our vet thinking he may be younger than previously estimated, perhaps just six months of age rather than the year and a half the shelter thought.

After I posted his intro blog, Leo chased Blaine out of the room and humped my leg.  The next day in the early evening before Blaine got home, Leo went nuts.   I was down on the floor with him when he suddenly started humping everything he could reach while I was trying to get up and away … my feet, my legs, my knees, my hands and arms when I tried to push him away.  I ended up leaving the room to find a stuffed rabbit to try to pacify him.  I thought he was going to give himself a heart attack with all his vigorous activity with his new stuffed bunny rabbit friend.  Then he came back after me.  I ended up sitting in my office chair with my feet curled underneath me or propped up on the desk.  Leo kept vigil on the rug beside me, just waiting for me to put a foot down.  Sometimes he would come stretching up to his full height trying to reach me on the chair.  Blaine says he wished he had been there to get it on video as he thinks it would have been hysterically funny.

The neuter has not yet tamed our little lion and I am sitting with my legs crossed underneath me in my chair as I write this.  Leo is again sitting on the rug waiting for me to put a foot down.  This evening is Leo’s first vet sanctioned free run time since the surgery.  The vet thinks that it will be at least a month or two before all the hormones leave Leo’s system.  It is going to be a long summer.  However, it is giving a good picture of just why a neuter / spay is a really good idea even with only one pet rabbit in a household.  The rabbit hormonal activities when they hit their bunny rabbit teens can be quite over the top.

If Little Leo will allow, I will post a Shadow story on Wednesday …

Leo the Lionhead – A Ballsy Bunny

Little Leo the Lionhead Rabbit

Introducing Leo the Lionhead

A little over a week ago, I had written that we had been really distracted here and thrown a bit off schedule.  Since the loss of Tigger and Shadow, I have been following a number of rescues and looking at Petfinder.com for rabbits.  I wasn’t really looking for a rabbit right now as I thought it might still be too soon.  There are belongings here in the house from Tigger and Shadow that need to be cleared away or bleach cleaned and the rooms with carpets need to be steam cleaned or have the carpeting replaced to be more sure that a new rabbit isn’t exposed to common rabbit illnesses that can be contagious.  Instead, I was looking for shelters or groups I wanted to keep an eye on for a bunny down the road.  That is until I saw the picture of Leo the Lionhead who was at a city shelter within a few hours round trip drive.  His picture called out to me in a way that no other rabbit photo had since the time I had seen our bunny Portia on a rescue site and had to meet her.

 Leo had been described as a personable, male Lionhead rabbit, neutered with an estimated age of a year and a half.  We were told his original owners had surrendered him to the shelter because they worked long hours and weren’t able to give him enough attention.  It saddened us to hear that he had not really been given a name, but had been called Mr. Bunny, but not even enough by that to recognize it as his name.  The shelter thought Leo was more fitting, but told us he wasn’t used to that either, so we could still change it to anything we wanted if we adopted him.  We thought Leo was a great name for a little Lionhead.

Leo was just as cute in person as his photo had been, very active and he liked to have his head petted and started begging us for attention quite quickly.  He had two scabbed over healing wounds in his side that were thought to be from Fly Strike which can be deadly for rabbits.  We were concerned about the status of the wounds and the staffer helping us took him to see the vet who was there at the time to verify the care still needed.  We didn’t realize we should also have asked that they check that Leo was actually neutered as advertised.

In a nice game of who has the ball, the answer is Leo does.  He has two of them actually, even though he wasn’t supposed to have any.  So the cautionary tale here is if you are told a male rabbit has been neutered, flip the bunny over for a double-check looky see.  Blaine said it must have been really cold when Leo was examined for his nice little set to have been missed.  We trusted the staff and didn’t try to do a full exam on Leo ourselves since we had planned to take him to our vet for a well check right away.  So, surprise, surprise when our vet turned him over and we had an obviously intact male rabbit.  He has been scheduled for surgery later this week.  Neutering a male rabbit even if he is your only rabbit can be a big help to curb territorial spraying, aggressiveness and other bad behaviors and lessen the smell of the urine.  Leo isn’t spraying or aggressive, but whoa, he is a stinky little fellow first thing in the morning when we let him out of his cage.

So once again, we seem to have a truly Rabbittude rabbit on our hands who was trying his best to keep a few things secret and hidden. Leo is going to be our office bunny for now.  We had one room in the home, one of the largest, that we had completely renovated to move our home office into.  It had been newly painted with a new floor installed.  We had just moved the office furniture and equipment in.  So little Leo now has a brand new cage and exercise pen there.  We will look to give him access to other areas once we have gotten the carpets cleaned or replaced in some rooms.  Since it turns out Leo needs to be neutered, there will be some time where he will need to be a bit less active anyway while he recovers.  So we have opportunity to get more running area ready for Leo.

We are just getting to know Leo and find out just what his tales will be and hope to have many to come down the road.  He is just so cute, we hope he will make it through the neutering surgery safely without any issues and won’t be too mad at us for being the ones to bring him in for that.  It is one of the reasons we were looking for an already altered rabbit, so that we would not have an issue of a rabbit associating us with pain and medication right at the start of our relationship.

Coming tomorrow, Shadow in Havana Heat Wave …

Senior Tigger

This is going to be a bit long, because I am going to share the hardest illness of Tigger’s life to deal with which actually wasn’t the very end. At the very end, it was a gradual slowing down, stiffening up, eyesight fading away, hunger coming and going over a period of months until it was quite clear the end had arrived.

Is Tigger resting or in pain?

Tough call position: Tigger would hen up to nap, but would also hen up if she was in pain. The difference in judging was often the length of time she stayed in this position. More than a few hours with an unwillingness to move when nudged, meant she was in pain.

The vet started talking about Tigger as an elder bunny after turning eight years old. At that point there really wasn’t much other than a slight slowing down and gassy tummy issues occurring more often to show that she was getting up in years.  Most of the time, Tigger was Tigger, sassy and getting into everything and hassling Shadow if he wasn’t paying her enough of what she deemed the right attention.

When she was nine and a half years old, we had a crisis hit the neighborhood, literally when a bolt of lightning zapped all the way down into the ground.  I heard the thunder, saw the bolt of white light, felt the ground shake and everything in the house went off, all at the same time.  Frazzled doesn’t cover the feeling, everything needed checking on all at once … First I made sure the house hadn’t been hit and the bunnies were all right.  Then began the rounds of everything else.  Electricity was off for several hours, when it came back on, I began to realize that we had problems with a lot of systems and equipment.  The phone line was coming and going making calling for assistance hard.  This one taught me to always make sure my cell phone was charged.

Over the next week we had a whole series of repairmen trooping in to fix things.  It was August and extremely hot, so we had to rent a portable air conditioner for a day for the rabbits room until we could get the A/C rigged to just run until a part of the switching system could be replaced.  After an exhausting week, we thought we had things back to normal again.  That is when we noticed that Tigger wasn’t eating and drinking enough.  We tried the usual tummy routine we had for her when she would seem gassy.  We would give her Simethicone, extra water and tummy rubs.  Usually that would have her responding back to normal within 12 hours at the most, but it wasn’t working this time.  We took her in to the vet and didn’t find out anything more than we knew before we went in.  We were told to keep up with the Simethicone and feed her with Oxbow Critical Care as needed.  We also tried wilted greens as suggested.

Over the next week, there was no real change, no improvement.  We went in again and the doctor did another exam and suggested putting Tigger under anesthesia to do a good exam of the teeth.  We knew the anesthesia at her age was risky, but didn’t feel we had a choice.  She had begun grinding her teeth on a regular basis.  It was obvious she was in pain somewhere.  The vet brought her back in fairly quickly, really groggy from the anesthesia and said she had found one tooth that was a little pointy but didn’t know if that was the problem.  We were somewhat surprised she hadn’t just taken care of that while Tigger was under the anesthesia, but had been seeing the vet for years and really trusted her judgment and care, so didn’t push for asking why she hadn’t acted on that.

We were sent home again without much more than the bill for the trip, still told to do Simethicone, Critical Care and had a little bit of pain medicine for her. After another week with no improvement, we were reaching exhaustion trying to care for Tigger ourselves at home making sure she had enough feedings each day, enough water, pain meds and then still care for Shadow too and try to eat, sleep and work ourselves.  Tigger was still not wanting to eat much on her own, was still grinding her teeth in pain and was seeming as tired and unhappy as we were.

We weren’t getting much help when we would check in with the vets office by phone.  I would call and go through everything that was going on and be told someone would call me back.  Hours would pass and when I would call back, I would be greeted with surprise that I was expecting a call, because the chart had been noted Tigger was doing well ??? We went online seeking help from Etherbun.  It was suggested that we really needed to discuss the situation quite openly with the vet about what Tigger’s options and prognosis really were at this point.  Should motility drugs be tried?  Was she at a point where she might not recover?  Was it possible that euthanasia was the compassionate choice if she was in constant unrelieved pain?

We made another appointment with the vet with the intention of discussing and being open to knowing where things stood, however that might be.  It was an awful visit right from the start.  Tigger was in pain and completely freaked out.  After being weighed, she took a flying leap off the scale straight up into the air and landed teetering on my shoulder.  I had a split second vision of what a fall from five feet would do to her.  Fortunately for Tigger, I had early in life emergency training on how to help someone who is in danger of falling to the floor, by putting myself between them and the floor while doing a controlled fall myself.  I immediately fell forward onto my stomach across the exam table.  That shifted Tigger onto my back, surprised her and in the moment of surprise the vet tech was able to safely grab her.

The exam by the vet showed nothing any different from previous weeks and when we tried to discuss all our options, medications or whether this might be the end, the vet completely shut down the discussion and said she would never consider euthanasia for any animal she felt still had life in them.  Then she left the room.  I have never felt more tired or frustrated.  We didn’t want to lose Tigger, but we didn’t want to have her grinding her teeth in pain hour after hour, day after day either.  That was simply no way to live.  We left the office with basically the same thing we had from the previous two visits, another bill and instructions to keep doing what we were doing.

We reached out again on Etherbun and were put in touch with a rabbit rescuer who had a great deal of experience dealing with rabbits in stasis.  He was wonderful.  He told us to get to another vet ASAP, to get as much water into Tigger as we could and what pain and motility medicines to call up and insist the current vet provide us with until we could get a second opinion.  The increased water and pain medicine helped Tigger be a bit more comfortable.  The motility drug, we had to stop after two doses, Tigger developed seizure like head movements which was one of the serious side effects noted to watch out for.  We had an appointment set for a new vet in a just a couple of days.

With the new vet, we were dismayed that the record transfer we had requested from the other vet had not taken place as we had been assured it had by the other vet’s office staff.  We went over the whole history and everything that had been tried and everything Tigger had gone through.  The vet was very patient and took her time with a thorough exam.  We told the vet we didn’t know what to do, it was obvious Tigger was in constant pain and although we didn’t want to lose her, we could not continue to put her through nothing but pain either.  The vet gave us the option to try having an exam done under anesthesia to see if there was a tooth issue that needed to be addressed.  She warned us that since Tigger was elderly and had been under anesthesia just a little over a week before, there was a much greater risk that she would not wake up.  We did not see any choice but to try.

Thankfully, the vet filed down the sharp tooth the previous vet had noted and Tigger did awake easily from the anesthesia.  She started to recover after that and was back to herself again soon.  I have never written about this before, because it was just such a painful experience to go through for all of us.  I am not sure if the stress of the lightning strike played a part in Tigger’s illness or if all the lengthy repairs after the strike just kept us from noticing a problem sooner.  I have no idea why after years with the one vet, the communication took so many seemingly wrong turns.  I am writing about the experience now so that hopefully others won’t have to go through the same thing.  Even if you have a vet you have loved who has been great in the past, if it suddenly seems that you aren’t being heard or helped, seek a second opinion. Your reward for acting to find another option might then be the same as ours, more time to enjoy with your rabbit.  We were blessed with another year and half with Tigger after she recovered.

This weekend, a gallery of Tigger photos and next week Shadow’s stories begin …