I spuddle.

How can I come up with five things to say about rabbits, you ask?   EASY.   That’s how.   I have more than five.   I could probably, under pressure, come up with maybe even SIX.   Six things about rabbits.   Hold on to your hats or whatever you want to hold on to or don’t even hold on to anything.   I don’t care.    Here goes:

1.   When I was a kid, which was a long time ago, but I still remember it in that way that we remember being kids, which is to say that we’ve made up half the stuff and edited our entire childhoods such that they make better anecdotes at cocktail parties, not that any of us go to cocktail parties, but we’re all old enough (at least I am) to go to one if I feel like it and/or if I am invited to one, which never happens.   Are you with me so far?   No?   Oh well, I’m doing the best I can.   My point is that I wanted a rabbit when I was a kid.  I wanted a rabbit with the obsessive fervor that other kids focused on wanting to become rockstars or to get a date with John Stamos, except I was really a kid and too young to want to date anyone.    On my bedroom walls, I had floor to ceiling posters of rabbits and framed art prints of rabbits.  I had shelves full of rabbit figurines, stuffed rabbits, small china rabbits, little wooden rabbits, ONE MILLION RABBITS.   I read Watership Down when I was eight.  MORE THAN ONCE.   I even had a book about How To Care for Your Pet Rabbit, which when I think about it now, was kind of cruel because obviously at that age everything I had was a gift from my parents and why would they give me such a book WHEN THEY WOULD NOT LET ME HAVE A RABBIT?   Yes, that’s right, I was not allowed.  This is because my sisters had guinea pigs.   One each.   The guinea pigs were named Boris and Annabelle and they were kept in our depressing, unfinished basement in side by side cages, where they squeaked pitifully and hoped to have their woodchips changed.   And who changed the wood chips?   I DID.   Yes, my sisters paid me, but still, I did it.   Because we were all afraid of the basement.   And worse, we were afraid that the guinea pigs would be dead (morbid much?) when we went down there, so we didn’t want to look.   I don’t know why we were so terrified of the guinea pigs mortality, but we were.   Later, they died of paint fume inhalation while being looked after by our cousins, so all that worry was for naught.   Regardless, my sisters’ poor caretaking of their pets meant that I had to do the work AND I was not allowed to have a pet of my own.   SPOT THE IRONY.    One day, I’ll have to write my autobiography and I will call it, “I NEVER GOT TO OWN A PET RABBIT AND THAT IS NOT FAIR.”   Or something like that.   You know, I’d polish the actual title before publication.

2.   On the weekend, we took the kids up to UVic to hunt rabbits.  NO, NOT FOR EATING.   For fun!  Because nothing says “fun” like running around on rabbit-poop encrusted lawns trying to force feed celery to unwilling, long-eared rodents.    I don’t know if you’ve ever been to UVic, I did, but it was twenty years ago and back then the “rabbit problem” meant that there were a few dozen rabbits romping around on campus and eating the decorative plants.    Holy hellcats, times have changed.   NOW if you go to UVic on, say, a holiday Monday when there are very few people around, you will find that there are no less than FIVE MILLION RABBITS on campus.   They have taken over.   I’m not going to say that I think they’ve eaten all the students, but it’s a possibility.   There were very few students around.    What’s even more worrying is that the rabbits really DO stay on the UVic campus, which if you don’t know, is located in a lovely suburban neighbourhood of lawns and lush gardens.   The rabbits DO cross the road but remain on UVic property.   YOU NEVER SEE A RABBIT ON A NEIGHBOURING LAWN.    What is WITH the rabbits — all FIVE MILLION OF THEM — that they willingly confine themselves to UVic property?   I know what you’re thinking, and I’m thinking the very same thing:   They are not actually rabbits.   Rather, they are some kind of bizarre UVic experiment gone awry.   I KNOW, RIGHT?

The kids had a lot of fun.   No, I don’t know why the pictures came out so yellow but I kind of like them.  It’s SEPIA, people.   Work with me here.

3.  If I was  UVic student, (which I’m not, and never will be again, not because I have anything against UVic but because I am too old to be a student and when I look at the actual students at UVic, I get the anxious realization that I am actually old even though I feel exactly the same age as I was when I went there, which was 18/19/etc.    I can remember what I wore, who my professors were, who my friends were, what we talked about, what we ate, where we went in lieu of going to class, EVERYTHING, with a clarity that shocks me because I can’t remember a) what day it is and b) why I came downstairs) I would TOTALLY make a horror movie called The Rabbits, spoofing the Hitchcock classic The Birds and not starring Tippi Hedron because she’s probably dead, but starring someone wearing a Tippi Hedron-style wig which are always available around Halloween because dressing up as Tippi Hedron with a bunch of birds attacking you is nothing but all kinds of awesome and may be my favourite Halloween costume ever.    In my movie, obviously, it would be rabbits and not birds because I’m not exaggerating the number of frightening, blank-looking rabbits on that campus.   Really.   MILLIONS.   And they all LOOK at you with these creepy eyes that look like the eyes of a really bored, vacant human, and those eyes say, “I really want to be an extra in a low-budget horror movie featuring man-eating rabbits.”   They do.    I’m serious. Rabbits are the new vampires. In about a year or maybe ten or maybe not even in your lifetime but at some point in the distant future, I’ll bet the shelves will be flooded with Twilight-style books about sexy, killer rabbits. You heard it here first.

4.   I know all these stories are basically the same story but what can I tell you?   It’s hard to come up with rabbit anecdotes once I get past the moral outrage that I feel that I was never allowed to own my own rabbit even though I knew more about how to care for rabbits than any other seven year old on the planet.   I did not mention that I slept with a stuffed rabbit named Bunny for my entire life, well obviously not my ENTIRE life, like I’m not sleeping with Bunny right now mostly because it would fall apart if I accidentally rolled over on it, and it’s hard for me to even call Bunny an “it” but I don’t want to say “him” and make you all think that I’m insane.   Anyway, as an adult, I renamed Bunny “Nub” because that sounded more mature and also a more accurate depiction of what he looked like.   Therefore, it was only reasonable that I call my son Bunny (as the name was freed up by the renaming of Bunny), which I didn’t do.  I mean, we gave him a regular name, but right from the minute he popped out (and I’m using the words “popped” and “out” here to gloss over the horrific nature of how he actually entered the world), I called him my little Bunny which gradually got shortened to Bun and then we added “The” in front so it was more like a title than an actual name.    I realize that all sounds crazy, and it is, so that’s a justified judgement on your part.   In any event, The Bun was at a playdate last week and the boy who was hosting the playdate (hosting?  What the hell am I saying?) had a rabbit and that rabbit was hilarious, by the way, it was huge and had a tiny head and sat up on the couch like a human, looking around as if to say, “Well, hello, my people, bring me food on trays and dance and sing for my entertainment”, and that rabbit’s name was BUNBUN.   So The Bun said, “Hey, that’s my name!”  Which was confusing to the host-kid because he was like, “No, it’s not.”  And The Bun said, “Well, it’s my MIDDLE name.”   Later, in the car, I said, “Honey, do you know what your middle name is?”  And he said, “The Bun.”  And I said, “Actually, that’s a nickname.   Your middle name is not The Bun.”  And he was quite cross, and said, “Yes, it is.”  So I said, “IS NOT.”  And he said, “IS SO.”   Etc.    So there’s that.

5.   One of the major reasons why we went to UVic to feed the bunnies was because The Stepson wanted to catch one.   He was convinced that he’d caught one before but when we discussed it later, we realized that he was not with me when he’d caught one, nor was he with his dad, and in fact, odds were good that he hadn’t caught one before but he’d wanted to catch one and liked the idea of it so was supporting his belief that they were easy to catch with a false memory of actually catching one in the past.   Unfortunately, due to circumstances beyond his control, The Stepson is not terribly good at sneaking up on small wild animals and plucking them from the ground.   This is at least partly to do with the fact that he doesn’t actually want to TOUCH a rabbit, especially one that’s been hopping around on a big field of rabbit feces for his/her entire life.   Regardless, he was determined to catch one and the stress of the situation was only escalated by a three year old toddling up and plucking up one of the bunnies and clutching it until his dad saw and made him drop the filthy, disgusting, mangy, and possibly diseased creature.    The Stepson was not successful in his quest to pick one up, but I maintain that it would certainly be possible, if you wanted one, but you would, in fact, have to touch it.    Which brings me to another point that I may have made already but am making again here:   I think the bunnies at UVic are all clones.   If you look at the picture above, you’ll see what I mean.   THE RABBITS ARE ALL EXACTLY THE SAME.    Terrifying.    This last point is actually a mish-mash of every other thing I was going to say about the rabbits.    One of those things is, “Who exactly cleans up after these animals?”   And another is, “Does UVic intentionally breed these creatures in order to save on lawn mowing expenses?”  And one more is, “Don’t rabbits carry some kind of awful disease that affects pregnant women and the elderly?  Or is that cats?  Or am I making it up?”   No, I’m not pregnant.   Give your head a shake.    I’m just wondering about the overall environmental impact of the TWENTY MILLION RABBITS* on the UVic campus.   On the plus side, the rabbit population gives student journalists a lot of things to write about, as the debate about whether or not cross-bow hunting should be allowed rages on.

*Rabbits breed so quickly that they’ve surely multiplied 4x since I started writing this post.

Filed under: Five Thing Friday