I was talking to my father on the phone last week. He had built a treehouse behind his garden for his grandson-in-law. “Remember the treehouse you had?” my father said, and in a flash I did: A spacious, sturdy two story construction with hard wood floor finishes, a ladder, and views of bustling Egypt Road and my father’s strawberry patch. Amenities included a nearby tire swing, a sprinkler in the summers, and, for a while, a rabbit hutch.
One day I headed out to the treehouse and peeked inside the hutch to see my rabbit Fluffy eating her freshly-born babies. She stopped nibbling on the small white sacks and looked at me with that vacant haunting rabbit stare. When my father mentioned the treehouse, the memory of gore in the rabbit hutch came flooding back to me. I was 6 or 7 years old, yet I can recall every single pixel of Fluffy, neck deep in the blood of her babies.
“They were born dead and that’s how rabbits bury their babies,” my mother told me, an entirely suitable explanation for a child. Rabbits lack a maternal instinct. Even the ones who don’t chow on their young are grudging mothers, characteristic for an animal that can have dozens of offspring in one season.
But little human girls are born with a keen mothering instinct, and I with my Barbies and love for playing house and school was no different. I would be bustling around my treehouse, preparing meals of leaves and “meat” (tree bark), and I’d glance over at Fluffy’s hutch, contemptuous of my cannibalistic neighbor. I’ve hated rabbits ever since, and I was relieved when the neighbor’s dog mauled them. We soon got 2 male kittens, who grew up to also eat baby rabbits.
Indeed, the world has it out for baby rabbits. I knew a man once who ran over a nest of baby rabbits with his lawn mower. He said they didn’t make a sound. How do we reckon dead baby rabbits? Why care about something we never would have cared about unless meted a climacteric fate?
