Tag Archives: cute

An Adorable Rabbit Video

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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 …

 

Shades of Shadow – A Little Leo Gallery

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We don’t know a lot about Leo’s personality yet, but what we have seen is reminding us so strongly of Shadow that we keep starting to call him Shadow and then have to stop and correct ourselves.  Leo is very active, playful, boyish and interactive.  That is when his remaining post-neuter hormones aren’t ruling him.  We don’t have lots of stories to tell about him yet as we are just in the early stages of getting to know him.  Like Shadow, Leo likes to lurk at times, just peaking around the edges of furniture.  He also loves to play with toys and like Shadow has a habit of landing his toys in his water bowl.  Unlike Shadow, we have been able to give Leo a blanket.  Shadow would have eaten the blanket and put his digestive system at great risk.  Leo is playing with his blanket and the blanket follows him around his exercise pen.  It too has landed in the water bowl once so far.  Also like Shadow, when I start taking pictures of Leo, he bounces up to find out what I am up to making it hard to get lots of pictures of him in action.

On Thursday some of the things we learned from Shadow when he was ill …

Leo the Lionhead – Update

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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

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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 …

Shadow the Puppy Bunny

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Shadow on the bed checking things out.
 Shadow just has to get in to this corner
Shadow boxes himself in

Shadow was a very happy bouncy puppy bunny, always ready to have fun. He would steal your heart with his wonderful playfulness and sweet nature.  He was always ready to hop up and introduce himself.  Like a dog, he considered everyone to be his friend.  He had that same doggie way of tipping his head to the side as if he was asking a question.  It was just so much fun to watch him checking everything out.  While Tigger was quite a serious rabbit, Shadow was all lightness and play.

He just loved to run around like crazy and play with things.  Unlike most rabbits, Shadow liked to be chased.  He would run up to you and then take off again looking back to get you to chase him.  Shadow would just love it when Blaine would instigate the chase by pretending to charge at him.

Shadow loved to be petted, especially his head.  If either of us started to pet Tigger and Shadow was nowhere in sight, within just a minute or two, he would be charging up and flopping down.  If you weren’t petting his head, you would get the little head butt on your palm as a reminder to pet his head.  He would also burrow under your hand to position his head just right for petting.

The little boy was decidedly a beggar too.  He would get up on his hind legs and do the begging dance to get his bunny biscuits.  Once he realized that the top of the cages was the closest to where the biscuits were kept, he would leap up there and dance around.  He got so crazy one time he hopped himself off the side of the cage while he was up on two legs begging.  After that, we would position ourselves right at the side of the cage so he couldn’t hop off in his excitement.  Instead, we would have a bunny batting his front paws against us if we took too long getting those bunny treats out of the container.

Also like a dog, he loved to dig.  We had uncovered litter boxes until Shadow came along.  Then Shadow showed us he saw the litter boxes as multi purpose.  He would use them quite nicely to do his business and then he would dig them all out.  His skills at excavation were quite remarkable.  He could empty a whole litter box of pellets and have it spread out over a six-foot area.  We had to invest in a number of litter boxes with tops which both rabbits actually loved since the tops provided another hang out spot for them.  We had to get more small throw rugs so that the plastic tops weren’t quite so slippery.  We used Acco binder clips to fold and shape the corners of the rugs to be a close fit  to the tops.

We read at one point that use a spray bottle filled with water and squirting a misbehaving bunny could deter bad behavior.  Tigger did not like being squirted with water and would stop, but we gave up on using that to deter Shadow.  We could give him several squirts and he would just shake himself off like a little dog and keep on going with whatever he was doing which was usually chewing something.

Coming Wednesday, Shadow the bunny goat …

 

Shadow Meets the Vet

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Shadow checking things outWe had a little bit of time to get to know Shadow before we went in to the vet for a once over check up.  We weren’t expecting any surprises.  We believed we had a boy / girl pairing and were keeping the two rabbits apart until they could be fixed.  Granted, Shadow was quite a tiny bunny, so we weren’t basing our feeling that we had a boy on anything we saw.  Rather, we thought Shadow was a boy due to basic bunny functions.  Shadow was still in the process of learning to use a litter box.  While learning, if Shadow was sitting by a wall and the urge hit, the little squirt would spray the wall behind, not the floor underneath. Also, Shadow just seemed so very boyish in actions and play which was a real contrast to the dainty femininity that Tigger displayed.  They seemed to be opposites.

So on visiting the vet, we were quite surprised when the vet told us we had another girl.  We strongly questioned that opinion based on the spraying activity we had seen and Shadow was taken out of the room for an exam by another vet.  The second opinion was the same that we had another girl.  We were told we should go ahead and schedule both spays for the end of August.

We did set up the appointments, but didn’t say much until we hit the car when Blaine exclaimed he knew a male spray when he saw one.  I agreed and said I didn’t think the vets had this one right and we would proceed as we had been assuming that we had a boy / girl pair.  It did make for a weird couple of months wondering about Shadow’s he /she status.  Although we really felt we had a boy, just in case we were wrong, we weren’t quite sure whether to refer to him / her or say he / she.  Mostly, we just stuck to saying Shadow and trying not to wrap our brains around the confusion.

Jumping ahead instead of leaving you hanging for the rest of the story, a couple of weeks before the date of the spays, I noticed the fur starting to change color in two oval shapes on Shadow’s underside.  The placement looked just exactly right for what I remembered from our family bunny Thumper’s male rabbit anatomy.  I told Blaine that I thought that Shadow had a surprise planned for the vet and was dropping down testicles.  I remembered that had occurred with Thumper too between about three and four months of age.

When it came the day of the “spays”, we had intended to tell the vet right away that we thought Shadow had a surprise for him.  However, as I wrote before, Tigger injured her teeth the morning of the surgeries and when we arrived at the vet, we were talking about the need to examine Tigger’s injury and forgot to mention Shadow’s new revelation.  We got a call shortly after we left.  It was the vet telling us that he couldn’t spay Shadow, he was going to have to neuter him.  He told us Shadow was going to be a bit more peeved than the usual male rabbit after the surgery since the vet tech had done a belly shave before the vet had done his exam and realized the tummy shave wasn’t going to be needed.  Fortunately for us, Shadow was a very good boy, a real little gentleman, and his early vet visits and surgery were no problem at all.

Coming next week, meet Shadow the puppy bunny …

 

First Meeting with Shadow

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Baby ShadowEleven years ago on July 4th, we met Shadow for the first time.  Tigger was about four months old.  We had just boarded her for a weekend a couple of weeks earlier.  She had been so lonely, it had made us realize we needed to find her a bunny buddy.  We hadn’t had any opportunity to make plans for that or explore our options.  On the 4th, we were just back at the mall pet store to pick up some supplies for Tigger.

As we came in, we saw that there was a new batch of baby bunnies, more than a dozen in a front window enclosure.  I went back to the aisles to get what we needed for Tigger while Blaine stopped to pet some little bunny heads.  He reached his hand in to pet those closest to where he was standing.  Four feet across the enclosure the tiniest of the babies, an all black bunny, saw Blaine’s hand and came running at top speed over to Blaine.  The bunny rabbit sat up on hind legs and started nibbling at the hairs on Blaine’s hand.

I was told about the racing over introduction, I didn’t actually see it.  What I did see as I walked back to the front of the store with things for Tigger was Blaine holding a really cute and very tiny black baby bunny in his hands.  Looking at the two of them, even without hearing the story, I knew they had chosen each other just as Tigger and I had chosen each other two months before.  It was clear we were going home with more than just food and supplies for Tigger.  I hoped things would work out all right with them liking each other, but that was a problem for the future.  Right now I was looking at one of the cutest baby bunnies I had ever seen.  The rabbit was a ball of fluffy black fur all over.  It looked like Blaine was holding a Tribble (old Star Trek reference) with big ears.

For the moment, we needed to make arrangements for our new little friend.  We made sure we were bringing home enough supplies for two bunnies.  The pet shop didn’t have a cage for a rabbit, so we were going to have to take our new friend home and then find one somewhere else.  We knew enough to know that the two rabbits would need to be separate until we were sure what sex they both were and then likely until after being fixed if we had a boy / girl pair.  We also needed to find out more about safely introducing rabbits to each other.  Since Tigger was about four months old, she was nearing her full size while our new bunny was just a two month old baby.  Tigger at four pounds was currently twice the size of the new bunny.

Shadow nappingI was a bit concerned bringing our new bunny rabbit home without a cage.  Everything I had read had indicated it was a good idea to let rabbits settle in to their cage and feel safe and then allow them to explore their new surroundings as they felt comfortable.  Tigger had followed that pattern and had hung back in her cage the first few days before she really took off making every space she explored her own.

My fears of the new bunny feeling insecure or afraid were unfounded.  After we got home, I let our new friend explore the new surroundings while Blaine headed out to find a cage.  While Blaine was gone, our new little friend showed no sense of needing any place to hideout.  The bunny hopped all over the room, excitedly checking everything out and then hopped up on a pile of papers we had on a shelf of a rolling file cart and took a nap.  After the nap, our new little buddy continued on with the explorations.  Our new friend had so much energy and interest in everything!

Blaine returned with a cage which we set up next to Tigger’s so that they could get used to seeing and being close to each other.  We hadn’t decided on a name yet for our new friend.  We were talking about Ebony or Ebunny.  The next day, while letting our new friend run around, I kept losing him / her (who knew at that point?).  That is when I realized for the first time that we had brought home a rabbit who understood the concept of camouflage.  Our new bunny friend would find the darkest corner in the room or the darkest piece of furniture and would sit absolutely still blending in so well that it was a case of now you see the rabbit and now you don’t.

When Blaine returned home from work, I told him I thought we should call our new friend Shadow because of the bunny’s uncanny ability to find and blend into the shadows.  Shadow came to be such an appropriate name, first for the ability to hide in plain sight and then later being overshadowed by Tigger at times, but also playing her willing shadow and accomplice at others.

Coming on Friday, Shadow visits the vet for the first time …

 

The Kitty Cat Bunny Rabbit

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Well Hello, Tigger!So what is a kitty cat bunny rabbit?  Tigger had so many characteristics like a kitten or cat.  First there was her desire to scratch rather than bite.  She was constantly grooming herself more than any cat I have ever seen.  She was very conscious of keeping her fur in pristine condition.

We read a suggestion when Tigger and Shadow were little to use a spray bottle with water to give bunnies a squirt to discourage bad behavior.  Well Shadow would shake water squirts off like a puppy and continue being bad.  Tigger hated the water and would slink away like a cat, but furtively try to sneak back in later to continue when she hoped we weren’t watching.

Tigger was very independent.  She knew her name, no and lots of other words, but whether she responded, depended on whether she decided she felt like it.  She loved to preen for the camera.  And she wanted to be petted, but on her terms.  Those cute kitty style flops we showed on Wednesday, she would often get into the sweetest curled up positions and then look straight at us with those beautiful brown eyes.  It was an invitation to come pet her, she was ready and waiting now.  We called it her cute bunny con jobs, still we fell for it every time we saw it. 

The altered photo art piece I have shared today was created with the magic of Photoshop since I couldn’t ever catch this on film in real life.  Later in life, Tigger was more proactive and just a bit less distant when she wanted to be petted.  She would come to where we were sitting on the sofa or loveseat, stand up on her hind legs and peek over the edge to catch our eyes.  Then she would sink back down on the floor and hen up or flop out right below where our hand would be so that we could just reach down and pet her.

She was a bunny who purred.  She would tooth purr when we petted her, when Shadow groomed her or when you talked to her sweetly from across the room telling her she was a good bunny.  It was so soft, you rarely heard sound, but would feel or see her jaw gently moving and would know she was happily purring away.

Coming next week, Tigger gets into everything.

The Model Bunny Rabbit

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Tigger posing for the camera
You worked it baby girl!

From early on when the camera would come out, Tigger would pose.  This series of photos was all taken at one time within just a few minutes.  Tigger seemed to instinctively know to show off all sides of herself to the camera.  We really believe she knew she was beautiful. 

She had a way of moving that was dainty, delicate, precise and smooth.  Unless she was freaked by something, she was all very coordinated ballet like moves.  She may not have liked being picked up, but she loved attention.  If I brought out a camera and was taking pictures of Shadow and had no idea where Tigger was, usually within just a few minutes she would be hoping in and taking over the photo shoot.

Besides her desire to pose, we called Tigger our model bunny because of her finicky eating habits.  She was always slender, bordering on anorexic thinness and quite fussy about her food.  We always joked she was on the model diet, avoiding eating whenever possible, but grabbing yummy treats from time to time.  Tigger would sniff meal offerings and sometimes hop away.  We would put salad greens on a plastic picnic plate and she would sometimes take the plate and toss the salad.  Other times she would overturn pellet or hay bowls if they weren’t to her taste.  There was nothing physically wrong with her that the vet could find, she was just a really picky eater.   

One time when we had Tigger, Shadow and Portia, we received new pellets and hay from our regular company and the taste obviously differed significantly from past seasons.  All three bunnies turned their noses up at the new food.  We got some of the old season and mingled it in with the new and within a couple of days Shadow and Portia were eating it.  Tigger held out for two weeks refusing to touch the new.  We were feeding her lots of greens to make sure she was eating enough and checking her weight too. 

We spent a lot of time during the first five years of Tigger’s life following her around begging her to eat.  Then she suddenly started to eat as if she was making up for all the years of lost time.  We said that it was obvious our model bunny had retired and now intended to enjoy life to the full. 

We had never thought we would see our Tigger chubby.  The last six years of her life we had to watch that she didn’t eat too much fattening food.  We had to protect Shadow so that she didn’t hassle or attack him trying to steal his treats or push him away from food.  She would run dancing around our feet as we carried food and dive at the plates of greens as soon as they were put down acting like a starving rabbit.  Sometimes she would move to stand on the plate hovering above the food making it hard for Shadow to get his share.  She became chubby at times and we would have to put her on a more restricted diet to get her weight back down again.  

Next post on Friday, the Kitty Bunny …

A Favorite Photo of Tigger & Shadow

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Tigger & Shadow at rest
I love this photo. It shows off Tigger’s beautiful fur and her love of laying kitty style on her side. She also loved to have one little paw up by her face, sometimes almost in a sucking her paw look. It was such a cute reflex action of hers. Shadow is in the background doing what he liked to do best, blending into something dark so that it was really hard to truly see him.

Coming Wednesday, Tigger the Model Bunny.

Meet the Velcro Rabbit

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Tigger the Velcro RabbitPreviously, I wrote about how much Tigger hated being picked up and held.  There came to be one place that was an exception for her where she wanted me to hold her and not put her down.

It was my custom at vet visits to keep handling of Tigger to a minimum thinking that was what she prefered.  So I would pick her up out of her carrier, put her on the scale to get her weight and then put her right back into the carrier afterwards until the vet would come in to examine her.  I discovered Tigger the Velcro Rabbit by accident.  Usually, I am wearing knit tops, Tees for the most part.  On one visit when she was about a year and a half old, it was chilly and I had on a sweater.

I was following my usual procedure and after the weigh in, I picked Tigger back up intending to put her back in her carrier.  That was when I discovered she was attached to my sweater.  She had hooked her little claws around the loose knit weave and wasn’t letting go.  I held on to her petting her and talking to her while we waited for the vet.  It was a bit of a problem detaching her from my sweater to then put her down for the exam when the vet came in.  It occurred to me that the vet’s office was perhaps an exception to Tigger’s don’t hold me rule. 

After that visit when she needed to go in, I would hold her and talk to her while we waited for the vet.  Many times she would hide her head underneath my arm and not want to even look around.  She would try to hold on to me and not want to be put down for the exam.  At times if the vet or vet tech forgot and didn’t continue to hold her quite firmly at the end the exam, she would actually make a little leap off the table straight into my arms.  I made sure to be standing right at the table at all times talking to her, petting her head or covering her eyes if she was getting really scared.  My rabbit was like Velcro and sticking to me in preference over the vet. I was clearly her chosen security. 

It was humbling and awesome to know that I had earned her trust to the level that she was placing herself in my care by her choice.  From that time forward whenever I held her at the vet or later in life when we needed to hold her for medicine, feedings or to clean her up, she also earned the nickname Baby Girl.  That is how we would be talking to her at those times:  “It’s okay Baby Girl”, “It will be over soon Baby Girl”, “We’ll look after you Baby Girl’, “Good Tigger, sweet Baby Girl”.

If it hadn’t been for wearing that sweater, I might not have discovered how much Tigger had come to regard me as her protector and that she wanted me to hold her and comfort her at the vet’s office.  So if you have a very independent rabbit and are trying to respect that, you might want to check to see if the vet’s office is an exception zone where they too would actually like some comfort cuddling.  We never took Tigger to the vet unnecessarily just to get cuddles, but it was a bonus to the visits to be able to make the visits better for her and get some snuggles in return.  Because of what we learned from Tigger, we also discovered that Shadow too sometimes wanted to be held and comforted while at the vet.