The Unexpected Legacy of Rabbit Ownership

What keeping thirteen rabbits taught me about being human

Last week I buried my longest lived guinea pig, Freddy, who died at seven years old. This week I buried my oldest rabbit, Dandelion, who died at just shy of ten years old. Last week was the week I handed in the first proper, book sized draft of The Ghost Lake to the editor who I’ll be working with at The Borough Press. I’m currently taking a few days off to decompress. But if you’re freelance yourself you’ll know that there’s really no such thing as time off. My compromise is an early start, a couple of hours keeping Spelt in control, checking in on my current course attendees, putting out fires in my inbox, before taking the rest of the day to walk, read, sleep. I worked Monday and Tuesday, I’ll work Friday. But in-between are two days where I can almost completely switch off from work and just be. I am spending a lot of time sleeping. I obviously needed it after running on deadline energy for the last nine months.

What a strange coincidence it was, then, that the link to my previous life should end at the same time as I moved through the first gateway of what I hope will be a new, more creative life. The handing in of the manuscript felt significant, was significant. This is the first time the book has been outside of my own head. I never actually thought I’d finish it. At one point I completely crumbled over it, but then pulled myself together and carried on just putting words on a page each day, until I reached more than 80,000 words.

I celebrated, as I have celebrated each step on this journey - being long listed in the Nan Shepherd prize, getting an agent, getting a book deal, the first slice of my advance arriving… with a bottle of bubbly wine and a note in my journal reminding myself to enjoy it. I saw this post by Katherine May that caught so many of the feelings about the book writing journey, especially the parts where you await edits, prepare yourself to be hurt, but also to work, because this is where the real work begins.

What books are really made of

And then Freddy died and then, just a few days later, Dandelion died too and it felt like a true ending, like a filament of time that linked me to a previous life had finally worn away and disintegrated. Let me tell you about the rabbits. Dandelion was the last of a line of rabbits that stretched back to when my husband and I were still going through IVF. This rabbit lineage stretched back to when, after needing to leave my job because of PTSD over my daughter’s death, I began a small animal care and dog walking business. I needed to put my need to mother something somewhere and as I moved into this new chapter of my life, I got two rabbits. Two lion heads, white and pure and beautiful rabbits with deep brown eyes and sweet natures. Little My and Mymbles were two girls. They remained living together as two girls for a good six months until I opened the sleeping compartment of the hutch one cold spring day and found a nest full of rabbit fur and six perfect, nude sausages of baby rabbits. I had, overnight, gone from owning two rabbits, to owning eight rabbits. We were about to head into another round of IVF. It felt like a sign. Of course I separated Mymbles and My. The babies began to grow into the most adorable fluffy balls. Then one day, four weeks later, I opened the sleeping compartment and there, lying in a nest of rabbit fur torn from her own chest were five more velveteen sausages. In the hours between giving birth and me finding the original babies, and separating the rabbits, they had managed to get it on and create another round of babies. I will admit to a slight panic setting in at this point. We were on the cusp of IVF. I now had thirteen rabbits. I had started a small animal boarding business and somehow managed to fill all the boarding hutches with identikit white rabbits of my own. I managed to find good homes for four of them, but I was fussy. The four I let go went to people who had boarded their own rabbits with me. It was such a joy to have them back for their holidays. But I couldn’t let the others go without knowing they would be treated well, cared for, and so I ended up with nine rabbits. They lived in an enormous enclosure 16 foot by 10 foot, which I had bought and installed for use in the boarding business. The enclosure had hutches in it, but the rabbits were free to live their rabbit lives in the run. They were not locked up, the run was fox proofed - as far as it’s possible to fox proof - and safe. I neutered the boys, of course. There were no more velveteen sausage incidents. The IVFs didn’t work. Our last one was a disaster, a turning point. After five rounds, losing our daughter, two miscarriages, and the last disastrous IVF, we decided to stop trying and embrace the future without children.

I would let the rabbits out into the garden sometimes, and sit with a cup of tea in the middle of them as they leapt and binkied, rolled and flopped in the grass. I would watch them interact with each other: petty skirmishes, hierarchy tests, but also the joy that rabbits have in each other, flopping over on their sides next to each other, washing each others ears. i even took another rabbit on, a netherland dwarf who had spent her nine years living in a three foot hutch facing a wall. She came to stay and learn to be a rabbit here too. I had a mostly hands off approach to them, aside from health checks, teeth checks, hair cuts (lion heads are ridiculously fluffy) they lived as near to a natural life as I could give them. And it was a joy to watch them do this, be the intelligent, problem solving, social animals that they were. They died off over the years. Often friends would die in the same year - Poppy and Daisy went within days of each other. Mymbles, Pan, the twins, until there was just Dandelion. I brought Dandelion up to a big hutch near the house, looked for a suitable friend for him, knowing he’d be miserable, that he would miss his brothers and sisters. And miss them he did. When he went out on the grass he would look down to where the big run was, searching and sniffing to see if they were there. I had no way of explaining to him that they had died, that he was the last one left. It broke my heart and I never found a suitable friend for him, though he was always near the guinea pigs and always had company from me. But he was a rabbit who liked the company of other rabbits. On the day he died, I knew he was on his way out. He had suddenly aged over the course of a week and on the day, I put a fresh towel in his hutch, something soft to snuggle. He lay in his cardboard box, his favourite thing, and I stroked his ears, and scratched his nose and he let me. He closed his eyes. An hour later I found him on his side, asleep, but not sleeping. He’d died. With him went that whole section of my life - the animal boarding business, the end of my career as a microbiologist, the last of the IVF - right at the time when my new life was opening up, when I had completed the initial draft of the book, had accomplished what I set out to do. I could never have dreamed that this would be where I was in the week of his death, on that day when I picked him up out of the fluffy nest and held him, at hours old. What joy they brought me, those mistakes, these accidental gifts from the universe. In science it’s frowned upon to attribute human characteristics to animals, to anthropomorphise their behaviour. I have often found this problematic. It assumes that humans are not also animals, are not also driven by instinct. But scratch beneath the surface and there we are, driven to procreate, socialise, love, grieve as any other animal is. We have a commonality of purpose, instinct, so why not emotion. What I learned from keeping these rabbits was the joy of just being, the joy of being rabbits. I want to hold that joy in me and somehow build it into my life, and that is what I am doing, I think, being true to myself and my purpose.

The News - In Brief

• In august I am running a free writing challenge based around the sensory summer. Read more here.

• I’m taking August off from the book club while I prepare for the launch of the paid option on Notes from the Margin, in September, but it will be back.

• In August I’m running my early morning writing group, come and join me for an hour of uncluttered writing from 7th August - find out more here:

• The Spelt competition for poems on a rural/nature theme is open, but be quick.

Enter here:

Until next time

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