Elf

Always the highlight of my meds round these last two months has been Elf, the easiest rabbit in the world to medicate and a bundle of laughs. Whenever he knew I was coming he would rush to the door and wait. No matter how many syringes with whatever medicine, he would grab them and play tug of war. What is not to love?

Recently he had been unwell, taking longer than we would have liked to recover, but did eventually stabilise and seemed to be happy and comfortable, if extremely thin. I think he liked the attention really and I liked giving him attention, but the universe had more things up its sleeve. Iain, our vet, believes that Elf may well have had lymphoma and would likely never have recovered. Sadly for us, he left the world by himself last weekend, quite suddenly and unexpectedly. We are glad at least that he seemed to go on a high.

Goodbye, sweet boy.

The House Elf

Elf could be renamed Mr Lucky after the last couple of weeks. He is one of our special needs rabbits with chronic digestive issues that result in him inexplicably going into bouts of stasis for a day. Usually the result of this is that we arrive in the morning to find a big mess and Elf looking rather pleased with himself.

A couple of weeks ago, however, Elf did not recover from his stasis and was horrendously unwell day after day, so much so that euthanasia was being discussed as a serious option. The curious thing was that he could swing between energetic and happy to wretched and in discomfort in the same day, with no apparent trigger.

I did at one point consider taking him home with me to monitor him over the weekend. Thankfully, having been taken off two of his meds and confined to his Special Needs Unit so he can't come out into his grass area, Elf has continued to eat and appears happier. He has lost a lot of weight and muscle condition, which we will try to get him to put back on, but for the time being he appears to have evaded the Grim Squeaker by a matter of days.

"What do you MEAN I'm not allowed out any more?? But who will eat all this lovely grass??"

Somehow dear boy, I think we'll find a few people willing...

National Elf Service

Elf, who is on several drugs for his digestive troubles, recently decided that he likes his medicines so much he'd like to learn how to to self-administer.

If only they were all so easy...

Elf Mouf

Elfy Bunnies

One of the benefits of cleaning out bunnies at the Rescue is that you find yourself spending more time with those in the less people-friendly enclosures than you otherwise would.

Take these two characters, who live in a low (for people) enclosure we made from several old runs screwed together. Apart from the odd health check, my main experience of them most weeks is their scrabble and grump with each other over food. It would be easy to think, based just on these encounters, that they were neither friendly nor particularly well bonded. But having hung out in their enclosure while cleaning it out last week I saw a completely different side to them. After they had a few minutes of stand-offish caution at my intrusion, we went nose-to-nose to say hello, the guard came down and in a very short time I got to give them lots of head-strokes. Without the food to compete over, or the strange human suddenly leaning into their space with it, they were delightfully friendly all round!

So in celebration of the bunnies who don't usually catch people's attention, I think they deserve a day on the blog!

"Hey, you'd be grumpy over breakfast if you lived with Solitaire - she always tries to scoff all my fave snacks!"

"Hmmm...I think you might have that backwards, oh husbun of mine..."