as small as a world and as large as alone

12:41am October 4, 2014

This rabbit serves as a reminder of the power that people have over each other. Rabbits need to run around like cats and dogs do. My family, like many families, didn’t know this and kept him in a hutch in the backyard his entire life. He had no intellectual stimulation. He had no room to run and jump. His feet developed deformities from walking on mesh all the time.

And it was our fault. Yes, we didn’t know better. But I knew better. Yes, I was a teen, I had very little power, and limited communication skills about internal feelings, especially the “this makes me sick” feeling that I got every time I was encouraged to kill and mount butterflies, or dress the cats up in doll clothes. I didn’t know that I had a very sensitive conscience when it came to animals.

But my sensitive conscience did me no good without being put into practice. And it did this rabbit no good. He lived and died lonely and isolated, foisted high up into a tree so the dog couldn’t eat through the barbed wire and get at him. I could have said something, I’m sure. I’m sure there’s something I could have done. But I didn’t.

And maybe I’m not to blame, exactly. I was a child. Teenagers are part child and part adult, and the mix varies. I was far more child than adult until I reached the age of nineteen or twenty. And I think I hit full adulthood at twenty-five or so. (Which is actually fairly well correlated with brain research, but that’s a tangent we don’t need.) Children are not fully responsible for what their family teaches them to do.

But teenagers are beginning to separate from their parents. And that queasy feeling, I should’ve found some way to act on it, to understand it. Of course I had more than the usual trouble understanding emotions nobody had modeled for me. I really did have plenty of reasons that I could not, not just would not, intervene.

But still. And this is not guilt or shame talking. I should have intervened. If you have a hutch rabbit in your house, you should intervene. I strongly suggest — whether you have a hutch rabbit or not — you visit the House Rabbit Society website. It will tell you everything you need to know about house rabbits and why rabbits should be indoor house pets like cats and dogs. Putting a rabbit in a hutch is like putting a cat or a dog in a hutch. Think about it. It’s that cruel.

I had almost no power as a teenager. I was in the psych system and I had severe communication delays that were being made worse by autistic catatonia and psych drugs. But I could have done something to save that bunny. He was one of the few people with less power than me. And you have to watch out when someone says they have no power. I “had no power”, but I had power over Reality. That was his name. And his name proved all too fitting: he taught me more about the reality of having power over others, than anyone has before or since. He suffered, he was lonely, he was intellectually and physically deprived, that’s how he lived, and that’s how he died.

Nothing I do now can ever make that right. But I can tell his story. I can tell you what I did wrong by not heeding the queasy feeling in my stomach. I can tell you that not having power in the human world doesn’t mean not having power in the animal world.

http://rabbit.org/

Go there, get educated, pass this on. Nobody should have to live like Reality lived. And too many people assume rabbits don’t need space to run, intellectual stimulation, social stimulation, and everything that cats and dogs need, except slightly different because cats aren’t dogs or rabbits, dogs aren’t rabbits or cats, and rabbits aren’t cats or dogs. But the gist of it is, if you really want a rabbit, you need a commitment to the lifespan of the rabbit, you need ongoing veterinary care, and the only purpose of a cage should be a sanctuary for the rabbit to feel safe in to sleep and such. (And they should never be made to walk on wire floors all the time.)

Seriously. If you’re at all a rabbit person, read up on this. I consider informing people of this situation the only atonement I can do for what Reality lost, partly because of me. Age and ignorance and disability are explanations, but they aren’t enough, not for him.

TL;DR:  Don’t put your rabbit in a hutch.  It hurts them in so many ways.  I’m not trying to make anyone feel ashamed or guilty for what you’ve done in the past, but sometimes ignorance can result in so much suffering and death from inadvertent abuse and neglect. If you have a queasy feeling about doing something, heed it, it’s probably your conscience.  Visit the House Rabbit Society for more information on the proper care of house rabbits.

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