bunnies!

[cellio]

Sunday was my congregation's annual mitzvah day (yes yes, every day is mitzvah day, but they organize a bigger community-service thing once a year). I've had bad luck with projects in the past; that a congregant is enthusiastic about some project does not automatically make him well-organized (cough). The best-run project I've been on, the one where I actually felt like I was doing something positive instead of twiddling my thumbs for the sake of PR, was run by Habitat for Humanity, but we don't do that any more. (And then Habitat for Humanity went over to the dark side so I don't support them any more.)

This year, as in the last few years, one of the projects was with the Humane Society, so I signed up for that. I thought we'd be doing things like walking the dogs and cleaning the cat kennels and whatever else needed to be done. But it turns out that their insurance company has been having words with them about fly-by-night volunteers, so we weren't allowed to do any of that because we haven't been through their formal training. Instead, we joined volunteers from the Pittsburgh House Rabbit Club in exercising, socializing, and generally playing with the shelter bunnies.

They had a large room set up with several low fences, each area enclosing either one or two bunnies with enough room to do stuff. There were about twenty bunnies total, many of them larger than my cats. They tended to be shy, but if you sat in the pen with them and offered toys, they would often come around. The senior bunnies, a pair of large, mostly-white bunnies with a few black splotches, were very mellow. (They had the run of the walkway between all the pens.)

This all reminded me of Stuart, the Dutch rabbit I had as a pet for about six months. I can't seem to find any pictures of him (hmm, I know I took pictures...), but the second one on the Wikipedia page is pretty close, except that Stuart was a stray, not a grand champion.

I hadn't been looking for a bunny in particular. I had just bought a house and so could finally safely have pets, but I hadn't done anything about it yet. Then someone on a local newsgroup was rather urgently trying to find a new home for a bunny, so after bringing all the might of rec.pets to bear on the problem, I decided this had promise. I wasn't interested in keeping him in a cage for the rest of his life (they're both smart and social), but Usenet told me that bunnies could be litter-trained. You know what they say: go not to Usenet for answers, for they will say both 'yay' and 'nay' and 'try another newsgroup', but I tried anyway. I ultimately failed in this task, but I was able to find someone else who already had litter-trained bunnies who was willing to add him to that colony. I did miss Stuart, but he was much better off with other bunnies, probably moreso than I had realized at the time. I didn't know until Sunday just how social they are or that some of them come in bonded pairs that must not be broken up. I also learned that the Humane Society hosts "bunny blind dates", which are mandatory if you already have a bunny and want to add another. Good idea. They also do this with dogs (optional there, I think), but they forbid it with cats -- the person telling me this explained that no one involved wants the amount of trauma that would bring. :-)

So I don't feel like I contributed much to the Humane Society on Sunday (continuing the pattern for mitzvah day), but it was kind of fun and it brought back memories of the pet who preceded the cats.