The $3500 Rabbit - Part II


Gravy was a part of the family. A fat lazy part of the family who would cuddle up next to you, would assassinate me if it meant more time with my wife and was a total whore for a piece of banana, but a part of the family[1]. After re-reading that description, he actually sounds like my brother.

And you can’t leave a part of the family behind.

No matter what Connor thought.

“If we give Gravy away,” he said, “We could get another bunny. Or a dog. If we got a bunny and it was young, it might let us hold it.”

“YEAH!” Lauren said.

I confess, that I started this in a playful manner saying, “You know, if we gave Gravy away…” never dreaming that they’d bite.

See, the BIG problem with Gravy was the holding, lap-sitting issue.

He’d come up next to you. He’d snuggle himself up close. He’d nudge you. But he did not like to be picked up and he didn’t like to sit on anyone’s lap.

To be sure, part of this is God’s fault, because he made rabbits prey and therefore chances are when you start to pick them up, every instinct inside of them says:

“I’m being eaten! Feets, do your stuff!”

If you have them from when they’re kittens[2] you can mostly get them used to handling. Right now we’ve had Gravy for almost three years and he’ll submit to a lap sit for maybe two minutes and if Lauren picks him up, you can see him silently suffering the indignity for the kid who brought him home. He doesn’t like it, but he’s grateful to her.[3]

So the problem, as soon as we put the house up for sale, became: What to do with Gravy?

He won’t let us hold him on a consistent enough basis that we would be comfortable carrying him through security to get him on the plane and rabbits, in struggling to get away, have been known to break their backs. And that’s what you want for you kids:

“We’re moving away from the only house you’ve ever known, pulling you away from your friends and your school and your church and your Godparents, and we killed your pet getting on the airplane. Shall we just skip the interim and go right from the airplane to the mental hospital?”

Patricia came home from the pet store one day with something she thought was darling. A rabbit carrier with a matching leash and harness.

“See. It matches!” she said triumphantly.

“He’s a rabbit,” I said. “We’re not even sure he can see color.”

“But we can get him through security with this. We can carry him on the plane with that,” she said, pointing at each of the items.

Well, it was a good idea.

It’s just that Gravy didn’t agree.

The harness fit around him like a vest, with Velcro and snaps for extra security. Rabbits are a bit like cats and can slip into small areas so when you snap ‘em in, you’d better snap ‘em in good. How they can have this kind of cartilaginous skeleton and still break their own back trying to escape, I don’t know. Ask Jack Hanna. I only own the damn thing. At least a rabbit doesn’t try to claw your eyes out or pee in your bra cups like a cat.[4]

We put him in his harness to get him used to it. For this to work[5], he’d have to not only get used to it, but tolerate it as we’d have to get him in his harness, put him in the carrier[6], get to the airport (which we, as yet, were not clear on how we were going to do) and then hook the leash up, get him and the carrier[7] through security[8]. The easy part would be the flight as it’s not like he was a terribly active animal. If he didn’t freak in the plane, he’d likely sleep only waking to get pet and, sadly, probably have some baby talk from Patricia. And then as soon as we got there, first thing we’d have to do would be get a new cage for him since his old one would be in transit on a moving truck.

So when we let him out that night, we put him in the harness. He hopped around a couple of minutes and then looked at me with an expression that is the soul of disgruntled.

Every time we tried it after that he would struggle to get away and chew at the harness.

I didn’t think he was liking it.

There had to be an easier way to transport one’s pet.

I took to the Internet.

There are, indeed, firms that specialize in moving animals. Mostly dogs and cats. Many had drop down menus listing the animals they moved. There were dogs and cats. Fish and gerbils. Hamsters, snakes, iguanas, various reptiles. But no rabbits. Not even “rodentia”.

So I had to email them to see if they moved rabbits. Then I had to find out how and if they had experience.

[1] None of these qualities, historically, would have disqualified him from being born a McLaughlin.

[2] Which is what Wikipedia says is the proper phrase and not “widdle bunny wabbit” – and I’m not saying who in the house said this, but I sleep with her.

[3] And she’ll probably give him a piece of banana. To be fair, he does buss her whenever she asks for a kiss.

[4] Not my bra cup, anyway.

[5] And believe me, I know explaining this sounds kinda like the lamest James Bond plot ever.

[6] That matched the harness. Very important. Please remember.

[7] Which would likely have some kind of – um – detritus of the poo variety as you could hardly expect the rabbit to hold it cross-country.

[8] Wonder how they would handle the poo on X-Ray?

ENTIRE CONTENTS COPYRIGHT 2009 by Shaun McLaughlin

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

THE LAST DAY IN PARADISE

Image
“ Isn ’t it cold there?” She asked me. “Colder than it is here,” I said. I was standing outside my son’s Third Grade classroom in Woodland Hills, CA [1] , waiting for him to let out so I could put him in the car and drive twenty minutes to wait outside a motel for my daughter’s middle school bus. I was talking to one of the other mothers. I say “other mothers” because many people think I’m a real mother – but perhaps the context is a bit different. “Does it go below freezing there?” She asked. We were talking about the fact that my house was on the market and I was moving my family out of Los Angeles, likely close to my hometown of Buffalo, NY. “Well, sure. I mean, it snows. It has to go below freezing.” She looked at me for a long time, obviously cogitating over the my weather report. “Don’t you die?” “Sorry?” “If you go outside and it’s below freezing --- don’t you die?” I like to tell the story of when I was working in Montreal. The first day I was there the
Read more

Home Inspection -- The Final

“Well, she’s worried about this beam…”, Tripper said, continuing on about the apparent danger in the garage. “Stuff’s been up there since before the Martin Luther King Day Earthquake, Tripper,” I said. “The only time I went up there was to pull a door down to see if I could fit it on to take the kids’ door with us.” “What?” “We’ve been measuring their height on the door since they could stand. Seemed like a good thing to take with us.” He looked through the papers on the house sale agreement. “I don’t think we have an exclusion on that.” “It wouldn’t work,” I said. “The door didn’t fit and it started to seem like too big a thing. But the point is, I pulled the door down and nothing fell.” “Well, we’ll have to get it looked at.” “The agent’s trying to screw us, isn’t she?” “Well, she’s…” “It’s okay. Just say it. We’re in a corner and she’s trying to take advantage of us.” “They’ve got someone coming out to look at the garage. Okay?” I knew he was serious, be
Read more

Home Inspection, Part Two

Tripper and I went over what the inspector had found. Nothing huge. But it’s continually amazing how different people in the same profession can find different things wrong with a house that you’ve been living in for twelve years and you never knew. We knew that the plumbing was part copper/part galvanized. This was common in L.A., especially in houses that had been remodeled once or twice. You want copper plumbing, but you don’t want to rip the walls out. The problem is that if the correct connecters aren’t put on, it turns into a chemistry set and REALLY starts to corrode in a process called electrolysis – which I thought was hair removal. We also knew that the crawlspace attic was clean – because we never went up there and it hadn’t been opened since the last house inspection. The guy who’d inspected before we bought told us it was a great storage space --- which we could have used, but with an opening in the ceiling the size and shape of a box of corn flakes, I couldn’t see h
Read more