A Plan for Leo – Part III

Posted on October 21, 2013 by Rabbittude

On 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

Posted on October 18, 2013 by Rabbittude

Earlier 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

Posted on October 7, 2013 by Rabbittude

On 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 …

Extra: Rabbits Always Ready to Surprise

Posted on August 22, 2012 by Rabbittude

After a combined 36 years in the lives of four rabbits, I am always learning there is much more to learn about bunnies. Leo appears to be susceptible to hiccups. I did not know that rabbits could have hiccups. I did some online research after his most recent attack and found a video of a rabbit experiencing hiccups and saw reports by many others of their rabbits experiencing hiccups:

Link to video if it isn’t working properly here: http://youtu.be/RSIkipInd28

I double checked with our vet today about when or if to be concerned. They said they would be want to see him if it starts happening everyday or if Leo seems distressed in some way or having breathing issues. So far it has occurred just twice with several weeks in between. Leo does not appear to be at all distressed, in fact he was laying down napping both times when he would just start making a funny noise and bouncing movement of his head. After no more than about a minute, it was gone again. It looked and sounded like hiccups, but took me completely by surprise because I had not seen or heard of hiccups before in a rabbit.

The vets staff recommended that if this happens again, we should try to capture it on video for the vet to take a look. That is a great suggestion for anyone with rabbits and weird symptoms since so often bringing them to the vet brings on such a fear response that even the sickest rabbit can often look quite healthy and normal when their systems kick into the fight or flight response of adrenaline flooding their systems. So Leo is giving us an extra added incentive to figure out how to have the video camera ready to catch him in action whatever that may be …

Tomorrow, the story of Shadow and parsley …

The Wonderful Pitty Pat of Bunny Paws Again

Posted on August 21, 2012 by Rabbittude

There is light at the end of the tunnel as hormones are finally starting to fade a bit for my little bunny rabbit stalker. Leo the Lionhead has been sitting by or under my chair for a month now focused on my feet, just waiting for me to put one down on the floor so that he could pounce. Yesterday and today, the feel of his stare is finally being replaced by the sound of his paws as he is starting to hop around the room and find other things that interest him. Thank goodness! My feet and legs were really getting cramped trying to keep them up on the chair all the time while he was out.

Blaine and I are now looking forward to a time soon to see what Little Leo is like without hormones ruling him. It was really cute yesterday morning and this morning when he started and finished a couple speedy Bunny 500s around the office. He began and ended them at my chair and seemed to be showing off for me. It has been so sweet to be able to get down on the floor a bit and interact with him without having to worry quite so much about getting love bites from those razor-sharp little teeth of his.

I am not sure what Leo did earlier today in his exercise pen area while I was working. I heard a splash and turned around to see a flood of water on the floor beside his water bowl. Blaine thought he tried to take a swim, but I am quite puzzled because he seemed to be dry to the touch. There wasn’t anything near the bowl that looked like he threw it in and the bowl is attached to the pen wall. I wonder if Leo tried to lift the pen and bounced the water out of the bowl?

Leo checking things out It is going to be interesting to see what kind of Rabbittude Little Leo the Lion will be showing us now. Tigger & Shadow really kept us hopping enough that we didn’t have the opportunity to experiment much to capture them on video. We will have to see if we can learn some bunny cam techniques with Leo.

Ah well … we aren’t completely out of the hormonal woods yet. Gotta go, I had a leg down and Leo is trying for a close encounter.

On Thursday, the story of Shadow and parsley …

Leo the Lionhead – Update

Posted on July 30, 2012 by Rabbittude

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

Posted on July 24, 2012 by Rabbittude

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 …

Rabbittude

Rabbits + Attitude = Rabbittude

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