Temperatures are hitting 30 degrees centigrade here in the UK today, so the house buns and I have decided to abandon our plans and spend the day in the garden.
Which means lots of lazy naps, intersperced with the occasional binky (them not me). Sadly they stopped their mad balletic leaps the moment they saw the camera, but I did manage to capture some of the more sedate moments.
One of the biggest frustrations of running a rescue is trying to educate people about the minimum size of run that will provide a suitable exercise area for bunnies. We ask for a minimum run size of 6ft by 10ft. The RWAF currently say 8ft by 6ft. Pet shops generally say "any size that gets you to part with your cash before you leave the shop".
We also ask for a minimum of 3ft high to allow comfortable headroom for binkying, though we suggest higher ones are better to allow you to sit in the run and interact with the bunnies.
There's another reason why the taller ones are better...
The extra height might keep the local undesirables off your roof!
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A little friend came to visit recently and we (Caroline and I) got talking to her mummy about how we organise our indoor space for our fluffy loved ones. We wanted to share their experiences on here, so she (mummy, not bunny) agreed to write this piece for us.
I am a pretty anxious bunny owner and completely and utterly love Alfie and Lola (formerly known as Cherish) - I would be devastated if anything happened to them but I think you can be too cautious (and not cautious enough). I was so cautious with Alfie I initially kept him like this:
I used to let him out for as long as I could each day, when I could supervise, thinking this was enough exercise for him.
I think the key thing for me was when I changed my thinking after speaking to Caroline, and realised that you don't need to cage a bunny to ensure that it is a safe bunny and that bunnies do not actually need to be stuck in cages at all. At first I was very nervous about the damage they would do to my flat and any dangers to them. I didn’t think my flat was unsupervised-bunny friendly at all. After some thought I realised I could reorganise a room for them, which was safe for them to be unsupervised.
Over time I have discovered that the less I bar them from, the less destructive they are and the more I get to know all their habits and behaviours. You just have to have the confidence. The first time I left Alfie alone in his room (before Lola joined him) I was worried about him all night. He was fine. Now, aside from chewing of furniture (I bought cheap Ikea furniture on purpose) and the odd patch of bunny wee, they are very well behaved in their room and corridor (and everywhere else, although I keep an eye on them in other rooms). I really think it's about ones attitude to rabbits and how they should be housed.
Now that they are never caged, I realise that they are in fact most active when I am asleep. When I leave my bedroom door open all night I really understand how busy they are. Last night Alfie spent most of the night using my bed as part of his assault course and Lola practiced her sprint turns on my bed for a large part of the night. Whilst I don’t recommend this (I do wake up a lot!), it would be awful for them to be caged when they really want to be very active.
Below are pictures of their room:
They don't necessarily need a whole room, which might not be possible anyway with 2 unbonded buns, for example, or if there isn’t a spare room going, but an extra fenced off area. Now that my attitude has changed, I would be very unhappy for Alfie and Lola to be caged at all. I'd also love for them to have some outside space but unfortunately this isn't possible at the moment.
Relaxing under their favourite table
All pictures by Anouska
Caroline was away on a well deserved holiday over the weekend, which left me with the pleasure of flushing out Joseph's eye with sterile fluids and eyedrops. Lucky me!
"Be careful with him, he's getting a bit bitey" Caroline's notes warned. It went something like this:
"Come on Joseph, let's get you out of the cage. [chomp] [chomp] ... [chomp] Now, onto a towel [chomp]. Now, I'm just [chomp] going to use this syringe [chomp] [chomp] to flush all the gunk out [chomp]...here we go...[flush][flush][splurgh]*...now [chomp] for some eye drops.. [chomp] . [plop] . [chomp] ... and we're done! Now that wasn't so bad was it?!" [disapproving-glare] [CHOMP!]
* Splurgh, in case you wondered, is the sound that eye puss makes as it squelches over your lap. Just so you know.
Interesting fact: All rabbits are at least 70 percent floof. Well, maybe not. But a great deal of their apparent physical shape is defined by their fur. I bet if you shaved Glamour and Tansley they'd look exactly the same. Well, maybe not that either. But I can almost guarantee you wouldn't recognize Glamour.
Anyway, what with their fur being such a defining feature, a key part in what makes so many of them so adorably cute and therefore us so powerless in their presence, it always saddens me deeply to see them without it. It's like at the back of my mind something's saying "You poor baby, how are you going to sucker the humans for treats now?". (The answer of course is sympathy - bunnies aren't stupid, they know how to work the angles.) And without the fur they look so much closer to the pictures of rabbit skeletons you see in the books, which makes it particularly disturbing.
This week Whisky had two abscesses removed, one from his ear and one from his upper-jaw/face. (He also had to have a rogue tooth removed while he was under.) All day while I waited to hear how the operation went I was sick with worry. When I picked him up, my first thought was how happy I was that he'd made it through OK. But despite all my rabbit experience, my second thought was still this: "Oh my, doesn't your head look tiny??!!"
NOTE: For those of you not familiar with Glamour and Tansley, pop on over to our Facebook page and have a browse through the 2009 picture album. And yes, they HAVE been with us that long and no, we've got no idea why either!
Long time residents Thistle (left) and Tansley (right) enjoying some tasty veg snacks together. An all too common story, they are the result of an un-spayed doe who escaped from her garden and "got it on" with the locals before returning with a surprise for her parents. Sadly not many people want rabbits with wild genes in their mix as they tend to be more cautious of humans. But after so long with us these guys are pretty bold, especially when you're holding the snack bucket!
