Tribute to Princess

This is Princess. Princess died Thursday.

Princess was born two years ago. We adopted him and his brother, Wilbur. Wilbur was the runt, thus the name. And Princess, well, what do you get when you have four daughters. One picked out Princess, Two picked out Wilbur. Huz had said absolutely no rabbits. He is the yes man, except when it comes to pets and kids. haha. So, the day we picked them up from our neighbor I didn't even have a cage for them. Soooo, I put them in the bathtub. Of course, all 400 of the neighbor kids came over to see the baby bunnies. As soon as Huz got home from work, one friend hollered at him that she loved our new, soft, little, baby bunnies. I was bummed. I had planned on keeping them in the bathtub until he noticed. He got that look in his eye, you know the one your dad usually gives you when you are wearing his patience thin, and said, "Wiifff." But by then it was too late. They were permanent members of our family.

Poor Princess the boy was doomed to his life. Someone casually mentioned to us that as the bunnies grew up, they may begin to fight because they were both boys and that we may need to separate them. So, when I hear the word MAY, I think maybe. What they should have told us was they WILL need to be separated. I thought that we would notice them fighting and not getting along and that if that ever happened, we would put them in separate cages. In the meantime they were keeping each other warm.

Little did I know that this was like a little bunny prison (if you get my drift) and that Princess's days were numbered.

One lovely spring afternoon in 2010, One's friend raced inside yelling, "Sister Holbrook!!! The raccoons attacked One's rabbit! Help!" Now, we had many raccoons that had caused many problems so hearing this I dropped what I was doing and ran outside. Poor One had taken Princess out of his cage to play with him and discovered he had indeed been attacked. It was like a bunny war zone. I really should have taken pictures, but it was so gory. Believe me though when I say that I am not exaggerating. It took me all of ten seconds to realize that poor Princess had not, in fact, been attacked by raccoons but by his very own brother!!

Princess was in shock. His tail had been chewed off (his vertebrae left exposed), along with his boy parts, part of his face, ear, left hind foot and the most ghastly of all (as if the previous weren't bad enough) were two giant holes in his hind quarters. I'm talking a good three inches wide EACH, and about 1 1/2 inches deep. It was disgusting. And my little kids had discovered this.

I left the kids with my sister (I think) and raced the rabbit to the animal emergency room. Huz met me there as I had called him and told him to. He stayed with the rabbit while I went home to finish making dinner and comfort the kids. Princess required surgery. And Huz actually asked me what I thought we should do-as if there were any question as to what my response would be. Several hundred dollars later our once free rabbit was back at home, in his own cage with bandages and medication. The medication had to be applied topically to all wounds twice daily and orally twice daily. If you think giving a toddler medicine is bad, try a crazed rabbit.

After several weeks of this, Princess began to recover. Eventually Huz decided we should let both rabbits out at the same time. This decision was obviously made while I was not at home. Wilbur went straight for Princess and both rabbits reared up on their hind legs and went at it. It was like a little rabbit boxing match. Did you know rabbits growl? They do. Huz separated them and I would've never known had the kids not busted him.

They eventually learned to just keep their distance from each other and we had a great time letting them out of their cages and playing with them and watching them bound across the grass. Less of a great time trying to clean their crazy massive amounts of poop (seriously, tons) from their cages.

I remember in our old neighborhood my kids would call their friends to come over and play. They would say, "We can get the rabbits out to play and then watch my mom try to catch them." Apparently it was quite a sight. I wouldn't know. I was too busy chasing circles around lilac bushes and lunging across the grass only to face plant empty handed.

When we moved, Princess became magic. As in he could escape from his cage. At first, I thought the neighbor kids were letting him out to play and then couldn't get him back in. Until the time we woke up one morning and Princess was sitting on our front porch. His favorite places were the front porch, underneath our back deck and our neighbor's front porch flower pot. We attempted tying his cage shut with layers and layers of twine until we could find something heavier to use that night. An hour later, though, Princess was hopping happily along the back grass. In desperation I found the biggest rock I could move. It is about the size of a basketball and I had to roll it. And I'm not a wimp. It was freaking heavy. I rolled it right up in front of his cage door. If I could barely move that rock, there was no way eleven pound Princess could. Except somehow he still got out. A lot.

Recently we saw him out the kitchen windows leaping through the snow as if he were taunting us. One and I raced outside and using our team efforts corralled him several times before actually catching him. One gets the credit for that. In shorts, she dove for Princess as if it were a volleyball. She had snow down her shirt, in her shorts, in her shoes, hair, face, but she caught him.

We had a funeral for Princess. It was a sad time for our kids. We laid him to rest near the creek in our backyard and piled rocks on his grave as a headstone (and so that any curious wild animals would have a very difficult time getting to his resting place). The top rock was, of course, the one that was in front of his cage. Hopefully it does a better job of keeping him in his grave than it did in his cage:)