Last week my pet bunny died. I woke up and took a shower and peeled a banana for her. I was plodding out into the backyard to bring it to her and saw her little body, tipped over in the grass. Rigor mortis was just setting in, her eyes still shiny, the sun reflected in them. I knelt down and cried for a while, as you do when a loved one dies. I touched her little bunny feet. A few flies had just found her so I covered her with my partner's robe. I didn't want to leave her, but I realized she was already gone. My wittle baby bunnykins.
I want to get a tattoo of her to memorialize her. Today I was researching the purported mystical attributes of bunnies. Most of what I ran across was about fear, and how fearful bunnies are, and what they teach us about fear. It's all about how weak and fragile and exposed they are, and it's a bunch of bollox. It's true that rabbits in general are prey more than predator, more defense than offense, and their primary evolutionary magic trick appears to be reproduction.
What can we say about the human "medicine card"? Humans appear pretty similar to rabbits when considering the species in broad generalities. My god there are a lot of us, with our iffy little canine teeth and poor posture. We've done a lot with the use of tools but are largely still fear-driven. As a species we're fiercely territorial and competitive beyond all rationality. Our wits appear as ill-proportioned as our canines when considering the level of cognitive dissonance we frequently nurse. A good many of us have a poor view of the species in general, but in general we are rather fond of our familiars. We extrapolate that the hoards of unknown people must be basically okay, if flawed, based on our emotional attachments to the people we hold dear. Thus we grapple with being members of a species insofar as we are capable of projecting a sense of similarity. In precisely the opposite reduction we view individual animals of other species. We have ideas of animals we've never really encountered based on generalizations about their species and anthropomorphic caricatures.
I feel that I have just ceased to know a great rabbit. I perceive her as remarkable to the degree that she differs from accounts of rabbits as a lot. She was a fearless little creature, in complete disregard of her fragility. Twice I witnessed a cat stalking her and once it came into her view, she went running up to greet it. Not surprisingly, the cats ran away.
The night she died I had a dream that a lion was after me. It was somewhat unclear what the lion wanted with me, but it was completely without fear. It ignored every obstacle in its single-minded pursuit. I suppose there's a cop-out option of getting a little lion-hearted bunny tattoo; but the point here is that she had a rabbit's heart. She was a fearless little creature, not in spite of or in relation to the ideas held about her; she just was.
It's strange coming to know an animal that isn't a dog or a cat, growing to understand the gestural vocabulary of a completely quiet animal. If she was happy she would leap into the air and spin, or run around you in circles as fast as she could go. If she was upset she would stomp her foot and turn her back on you, looking over one shoulder to be sure you saw her performance. If there were twenty people in the room dancing she wanted to be there too, immediately underfoot, or on the couch getting her eyes rubbed. If you tried to give her half the banana, she would take the other half away from you. She would try to steal my popsicles, especially the strawberry ones. She preferred carrot-tops to carrots, and would try to climb into the fridge any time it was opened in general disdain of her rabbit pellets. She liked to dig deep holes in the lawn and eat the weeds in the garden, and stare at the squirrels as they barked at her.
We were worried at one point that she was lonely and we adopted a little bunny playmate for her. He is, by all accounts, an ordinary rabbit. He is afraid of all of the things. He mostly eats grass and his pellets, and mostly ignores the carrots. It is difficult for me to discern between his various states of nervous, fear, attentive, and territorial poutiness. This week, it is clear to me that he is sad. He loiters around the spot where the other bunny died and smells the ground. He seems to be looking for her. I don't know how to make it better, because I don't feel like he relates to me as anything but the bringer of food and the giver of medicine. He tolerates being held without biting, his most extravagant social grace. Our only bond is that we miss the same dead bunny. I feel sad for him, but I venture no further guesses as to what else he feels. I hesitate to project my emotions beyond what I feel is obviously and viscerally comprehended by my own deeply incomprehensible impulse to sit near the ground where I found her in vain disbelief. My best hope is this gesture is so base as to be meaningful, a comfort to him, in that all misery loves company.
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