So Tigger, are you looking for your vet?
Since I hadn’t planned on bringing a bunny home, I wasn’t sure how easy it would be to find a good vet. It actually turned out that a rabbit savvy vet was close to where we lived. I set up an appointment. Then I had to find another larger pet store to get a proper carrier for Tigger to travel in. The original pet store had not had one and we had to bring her home in a cardboard pet box which was no way for a bunny to travel, dark and scary and easy to chew through if a rabbit got motivated enough.
I picked out a small kitty carrier where the top could be separated from the bottom allowing for easier storage and cleaning. The top and front had metal grille doors allowing for putting Tigger in through either opening and checking on her from the top to help prevent really easy escapes out an opened front door.
After making the appointment, we put the carrier in Tigger’s running space in the kitchen to get her used to it, so that it wasn’t completely unfamiliar when she had to go into it for the trip. Right away, as little as she was, she hopped up on top of it. That was an early sign of things to come with Tigger. First she sat up and looked at something and then she jumped on top of it.
On the day of the appointment, I put Tigger into the carrier and put it on the passenger seat next to me with the door facing me so that we could see each other on the trip. I used the seatbelt and shoulder harness to strap in the carrier to keep it in place should any sudden stops be needed which unfortunately occur a lot in busy metro Atlanta traffic. I drapped a small towel over the carrier top so that the sun wouldn’t shine in her eyes, but made sure the side vents were clear for enough air circulation. Then we were off.
There wasn’t a whole lot of Tigger for the vet to examine. I don’t remember her exact weight, but it was somewhere between 2 1/2 and 3 pounds. She was just a handful of bunny. The vet checked her over giving his opinion that it did indeed look like we had a little girl. The best news was that she was an otherwise healthy bunny who was malnourished due to a bad diet. He gave me a brochure for the Oxbow Company and suggested that I order some Alfalfa hay and pellets to fatten up our baby. Then we would add greens in upcoming months and switch to Timothy hay and pellets later on when she was full-grown. We discussed spaying her in about four months when she would be about six months old.
Tigger and I both left happy, she to be leaving the poking and prodding behind and I with fears of larger health problems relieved. I ordered her Alfalfa hay and pellets right away. When they arrived a few days later and I opened the package, it was like receiving a box full of meadow. The smell was wonderful. If I was a rabbit, I would have been all over that food. So, great new hay and pellets on board, bunny is about to be fattened up shortly.
That is when we started to get the drift that Tigger had a very stubborn little bunny mind and did not want to change from what she was used to which was the awful guinea pig pellets. I followed suggestions from rabbit sources online to mix the old pellets with the new. Tigger would pick out all the bad stuff and leave her good rabbit pellets behind. It took weeks and we were down to the very last spoonful of the guinea pig pellets before she decided that she liked her new Alfalfa pellets and switched over to eating them. Fortunately while she was arguing the pellets, she was liking the new Alfalfa hay. Slowly our bunny baby started losing some of her very bony feel.
Coming next, there’s a Tigger in the kitchen!
Eleven years ago we were shopping in the local mall just before Easter. As we passed the pet store, I saw they had baby bunnies. I have always been dubious of the health of pet shop animals and whether they had enough human interaction to be good pets, but I couldn’t ever resist petting little bunny heads if I saw they had some. 
