Bunnies!

My brother's dog, Milo surprised him a couple of days ago by waking him up with a dead baby rabbit in his living room. A female rabbit had had a litter in a hole in his back yard, and his dog managed to destroy three of the babies and leave two still alive in the hole. He told me about it and remembering how Laura constantly points out the baby rabbits in our neighborhood, I said that if they're still alive, we could be over ther in 20 minutes.

When we got them out of the hole, one of them made this unearthly, high pitched screeching noise but quited down once we had them in a towel lined box. The internet gave us a bunch of info and so we took em' home and fed them a bunch of Pedialyte and formula. One of them had a pretty sizable gash on it's left cheek, by it's eye, which got worse during the night. We did a little bit of bunny surgery, cleaned out the flap and then reattached it to its face with liquid bandage. We named that one "Left Eye". The other one, in better shape, had a cut on it's chin that we cleaned out. He has been since dubbed "Chinny".

The bunnies are roughly 5-6 days old and the chances of them surviving are pretty slim. In the wild, about 90% of the littler don't make it, which is just as well since they would overtake the planet in short order if not for that. If they do survive, we'll be releasing them in about a month (thats my plan anyhow).

It's a funny situation, morally speaking. In Maplewood, where we live, there are bunnies everywhere and save for hopping under a car or into a back yard inhabited by a dog, they have no natural predators. I've been on a kick lately where I've been wanting to revisit my meat-eating by killing, slaughtering and preparing an animal, but after this episode, I've effectively scratched rabbit off of the list of tasty dishes.