A Girl's Best Friend Is Her Basketball

[pronker]

Donna Earl is our last rabbit.  After being in the rabbit breeding business on the small end of the scale for seventeen years, the heat wave last summer killed the last male and when two old females died since then, Donna Earl, a four-year-old, lives alone in the fenced side yard.  Rabbits, unlike hares, have a social hierarchy and she has not given up hope for companionship, however.  She visits with all who venture near, poking her head through the fence for pats and if you spend time with her in her area, she comes up every ten minutes or so and butts you with her nose, saying "Hi."  But her BFF is her basketball.

Donna Earl is in a co-dependent relationship with her basketball.  There is a fallen-in stretch of ground where an old tunnel caved in; likely it held, at the end of its L-shape, a rounded burrow where tiny blind babies wriggled until their eyes opened and they popped out of the ground like mushrooms to delight the gaze.  Donna Earl's friend, the basketball, rolls in this groove.  Donna Earl tries industriously to interest her friend in sex; she performs rabbit foreplay, consisting of closely circling the basketball in short spurts, first counterclockwise, then clockwise.  She has not yet been observed trying to mount the basketball, as she had any breathing furry creature, because she is a lady in the bedroom.  The basketball has a headache, rolling a bit following insistent pushes with a hopeful quivering nose but not really getting into the spirit of the thing.  Donna Earl gives up and rests next to the basketball as she used to when tired out from sex with, in no particular order, her aunt, her mother and the resident male.  One momentous day there was a threesome rabbit-wich, head to tail to head.  She tries again an hour later, because it is all true what you have heard about rabbits, but the basketball remains soft, well, hard, but you know what I mean.  Since her attention span is like any other lagomorph's, Donna Earl lives in hope.

Through the years, I have seen bunnies with curling incisors that needed trimming monthly, a dead mother's last litter trying to nurse from her cooling body, a doe giving birth to fifteen beautifully-marked kits, and a truly remarkable scenario of an Alpha female turning Beta after being ganged up on by her coterie of two, each of whom became co-Alphas.  This story of the doe and her basketball is a paean to the rabbit spirit, making do with what is at hand and not wishing for the moon.  You go, Donna Earl!

 

Comments

[niicoly.livejournal.com]

I think I can stand to learn a lesson or two about perseverance from Donna. Breeding rabbits sounds interesting. Do you guys raise anything else as well?

[pronker]

Breeding rabbits has been a lesson all around, but also in the past we have had quail for eggs only as they refused to breed, zebra finches who bred fantastically well, bantam chickens who were adorable when their chicks rode around on the hen while poking their heads out through her feathers, and pheasants who were aloof, scared and who probably thanked us when we gave them to a nearby farmer. As pets, we've had rats, cats, parakeets, turtles, fish and one dog.

Donna Earl the lovelorn rabbit and Bete Noir the horny cat are the only resident animals now, unless you want to count the wild rats that get in under the house and sometimes into the garage. They scamper on the other side of the bathtub inside the walls, eeking and fighting and galloping on the waterpipes.