Good news for a change.

So after my rant on Monday I have some good news to share with you.  I managed to rescue the bunny on Monday afternoon and brought him home.  And no!  I did not kidnap him.  It was done all legitimate and shit.  He was severely malnourished and practically just skin and bone.  Someone tried to shave him and did an atrocious job of it.  When he got home he looked and smelled like a bum and that is when the work began.

When he got home I immediately noticed that he wasn’t eating.  At first I attributed this to stress.  But as he became more relaxed I knew there was a bigger problem at play.  On Wednesday I took him to the vet for a full checkup and to be neutered.  That’s when we discovered that the reason he wasn’t eating was because he couldn’t.  It was too painful.  You see due to having been given the wrong food and, from what it looked like, no hay he had developed spurs on his teeth.  It’s rather nasty and looks like little needles that make eating painful:  As a bunny try to eat these needles stick into his gums and as you can imagine it is very unpleasant.  So the vet filed off the spurs and he was good to go.

The first obstacle we faced with this new addition to our family was his name.  I wanted to name him Kazimer which means “The Great Destroyer” in Russian.  Hubby refused that we name him that and as he, in a very annoyed Tim Gunn voice, told me “I don’t want anything in our house that is known as The Great Destroyer.  This is why we can’t have nice things!”  So we decided to name him Dimitri which means “Lover of Earth” in Russian.  Hubby made our bun less of a worrier and more of a hippie because he is kind that way.  A bigger problem though was socializing Dimitri with our other bunnies.

As you may recall we have two other bunnies and they are both neutered boys.  They have bonded and love each other very much.  Apparently it is very strange to have two male bunnies bonded in this way but I guess it is true that the gay do rub off and is indeed contagious.  But before you call Nigerians to stone me – I am being facetious.  Knowing that socializing a new bunny with a bonded pair is notoriously difficult I thought “How bad can it really be?”  Well the answer is really bad.

With the first introduction there was a big ass fight between our youngest and smallest bun and Dimitri.  Fur flew, water bowels where thrown and there were tantrums and lots of screaming.  Ok, so the screaming was done by me but you get the idea.  Consequently to the first introduction and fight there was three more introductions all of which saw me have mini nervous breakdowns and took a couple of years off my life.  I have also, in the mean time, employed several other sneaky tricks to ease them into accepting one another and the experts tell me that socializing them to the point where there are no longer fights could take anything from three weeks to eight months.

Dimitri is a gentle soul and has a very easy going personality.  He is very similar to our only male cat and I foresee that the two of them will become great friends down the line.  It took me two days to potty train Dimitri which also shows that he is super intelligent.  His favorite thing to do in the evenings is to chill with us on the couch and he loves cuddles.  This is a far cry from what he was use to.  He was kept in a chicken wire cage at an Angora breeder in which he could barely turn around.  He was only taken out of that cage to breed and to be shaved.  When he stopped eating the breeder was too stingy to take him to a vet and dumped him at a pet shop where, according to the vet, he would have died in three weeks from starvation if he wasn’t rescued.

It breaks my heart to know that there are people out there who doesn’t give a shit about animals; people who treat animals so badly that death would be preferable.  It makes my blood boil.  What I find appalling is the fact that bunnies are becoming more popular as pets.  People buy these cute little fur balls from a pet shop without knowing anything about them.  The have no clue about their diets, their health, emotional needs and what it takes to raise a happy, healthy and well rounded bunny.  Then at the first sight of problems they dump them.  My plea is that before anyone adopts or buys a pet first do your research.  Find out as much as you can about that animal and then decide if that pet will fit your lifestyle and if you will be capable and willing to care for that animal for the rest of that animal’s life.

Till next time.