A Drove of Rabbits; or Christian Charity, goddamnit

Part the First

Like Alice in Wonderland, it definitely started with a white rabbit. Prima was three, and had met a rabbit at some event or other, and I thought, what the heck and we took him in. Prima told us his name was WindowCottonowie in that insulting tone of voice toddlers have, as if we have let down the side on a very basic matter of etiquette. WindowCottonowie ate the overload of kale from our farm share, kept the chickens company, and contributed to the compost while he lived, and the soil in the field when he snuffed his last snuffle. A sweet and fond chapter in our book of pets.

Prima and Madison were best friends at church. When they were about 8 or 9, Madison went a little bunny-crazy. Her mom, Kristin, had met a lady, Patricia, at church who happened to be a rabbit breeder. I had nothing to do with any of this until Kristin introduced Patricia to me with a bit of a request. Patricia had just gotten a job a couple of hours away and was having trouble figuring out how to best move her breeding rabbits. She had twenty-two. Since my yard was a field, maybe if Kristin took eleven hutches and I took eleven hutches, Patricia could provide food. Then she'd have about six weeks to get herself settled and pick up the rabbits. Prima and Madison hopped up and down, so happy, please, oh please, oh please oh please, BUNNIES!

A week later, Kristin stayed with the kids while Clark, Doug and I went to pick up the rabbits. Patricia greeted us, and the first thing I noticed was that she was really, really relaxed, and that there didn't seem to be any signs of packing up around the place. That turned out to be an easy explanation, it was because she had not prepared in any way whatsoever for us to pick up the rabbits. Oh, and there weren't actually twenty-two rabbits, she merrily informed us. She "always lied about the numbers, because you know how people get." There were a lot, but she wasn't totally sure how many, because many of them were only visitors to their opened cages. And you'd only be a visitor, too, if your hutch looked like the toilet scene from Trainspotting. She did have a fairly accurate count of the ones in the derelict car in the driveway. And the ones living in the bathtub in the house. Everything was chaotic and filthy. Whatever veneer of functionality she had possessed at church was gone. We were suddenly on a tour of a woman's untethered inner psyche. Patricia was not a breeder. She was, in the graceful euphemism animal shelters use, a rabbit "collector." We got to work, although maybe we should have just run away, because it now felt like an episode of Animal Cops on Animal Planet.

I say we got to work, but in fact, only Clark, Doug and I got to work. Patricia held up the dirty cages helplessly, saying she had no idea how to proceed. She caught runaway rabbits, then put them back down on the ground. She opened cages that contained rabbits and took them out, cautioning them not to run away. They were not good listeners. Those of us that retained all our marbles ran around shaking rabbit poo and bedding out of cages, looking for water bottles, packing up rabbits and putting them into the van and the pickup. After Patricia attempted to liberate all of the packed rabbits, one of us had to be stationed guarding the vehicles at all times. At sundown, our pickup full, Clark and I finally left as Doug chased a black bunny into the woods in the dusk. Doug and Kristen ended up with eleven animals. Good thing we have a big field: Clark and I had fifty-eight. At the moment. Some of them were pregnant.

Part the Second

The rabbits were in tough shape. A male angora was a five-pound matt of of unkempt hair with ear damage from fighting. Patricia told us back at the house that this was one of her favorite rabbits, "because he was hurt." But of course, she had made sure he was hurt by caging him with other males, so there was a Munchausen-by-proxy thing going on as well. All the rabbits were inbred. I told Patricia that I would be getting new owners for as many of them as possible.

I frantically made crates out of anything I could find. It took forever. You don't want rabbits sharing a hutch. For all that they are a symbol of gentleness and softness, male rabbits do fight and inflict a lot of damage on each other. Females with males will do exactly what rabbits are so famous for doing. Females together are ok, but it's incredibly hard to be really certain you've accurately identified their gender. And if you're wrong, you have injuries or dear god, more rabbits.

For all their prolific breeding, rabbits are terrible mothers, at least the first time around. On the one hand, it was kind of good news that we weren't ending up with the total number that were born, but on the other hand, it was depressing to go out first thing in the morning and have to deal with cleaning out a cage of tiny newborns that the mom kicked to death. My kids certainly got an education in the miracle of birth and the inevitability of death.

Patricia dropped in. She let about twenty rabbits out and dug holes in my yard to make a rabbit amusement park. I started locking the gate. Then, amidst the hutch building and the long list of animal rescue places I was calling, she simply disappeared completely. Kristin could not locate her. She stopped paying for rabbit food. After some impressive Nancy Drew work, Kristin found her in a Boston homeless shelter. There was no job, there was no apartment, nothing. Patricia had just been evicted for her animal hoarding. I asked Kristin to let her know that the final date stood: whatever rabbits I couldn't place, went away on tax day.

I tried to give them away. Everybody has a story of unwisely giving or getting bunnies on Easter, right? Sorry, rural myth, and believe me I tried. No one wanted these animals. Not with bows on, not in baskets. Not the local shelter. Not the rescue groups. Not the pet store. No amount of advertising could unload them. No one wanted them. Finally I located a woman, a llama farmer, who agreed to take fifteen off my hands. And a lady down the street happened to see all the rabbits as she took a walk, and took away the healed, cleaned-up angora. But mostly, nobody wanted them, and while I was fine with keeping one or even two, we were now up to sixty-eight.

As April 15 approached, I was grappling with what their fate would be. Mention you have rabbits, and people will say oh, how cute. Mention that you have sixty eight, and people start hauling out their recipe books. I could eat them. I have eaten rabbit, but it's not my favorite, and the animals were not, shall we say, of high quality, and honestly, although I could see times in my life where this was a good option, at this point, I was just not hungry enough. I could euthanize them. Sad, and such a waste, and I wasn't entirely sure of my ability to reenact Old Yeller/Sweeney Todd almost seventy times. Or I could, in a highly illegal act, drive them to a state park and let them take their chances as nature's McNuggets. I couldn't decide what, if any, was the ethical move.

Then I got a call from Kristin. Patricia had shown up at her house early in the day of April fourteenth with a UHaul and a guy she found at the homeless shelter. They took hours loading up the rabbits, including taking one of Madison's out of spite. They racked up long-distance calls on Kristin's phone, trashed the entire yard and managed to get some cash out of Doug, who wanted them gone, and was sympathetic to the guy who was pretty annoyed to miss curfew back at the shelter.

On the fifteenth of April, Patricia arrived at my house with the UHaul. I was prepared, though. I sent the kids to my sister's house. I hid Prima's two rabbits in the crawl space. I put the stereo speakers in the windows, and then cranked tunes so I wouldn't have to deal with her craziness. As she arrived, Clark and I went outside in gloves and crappy clothes, locking the house doors. Then we hauled those sixty eight rabbits out of the yard. I got the bright idea of stacking the cages behind the tires of the truck so that she would have to move them if she wanted to leave. And we worked fast, intervening when Patricia tried to let the animals out of their cages to run around. Then we slammed the truck door, put Patricia into the driver's seat, said, "Bye now," and that was, at last, the end of it.

Epilogue

Enough time has passed that Kristin and I laugh about how doing a favor for an acquaintance morphed into enabling someone completely nuts. I still like to help people out, although I do try to get more details first. About a year after, we were talking about the whole ordeal, and a clergy member at our church interrupted us. "This is about rabbits, right? And was the woman named Patricia?" Yes, and yes. Well, it turned out that the diocese had a system-wide alert out on the rabbit lady, because she liked to hand out brown lunch bags containing rabbits to Sunday school children. There was no way to communicate her riskiness to the parish, because it would violate her privacy. Which I get, theoretically, but it was sad that there was no real way to actually help her, or the animals. When clergy, social workers, SPCA or town animal control got too close, Patricia just took off and moved. Before ending up at our church, she had shown up at a little one about a half hour north of us with a truck full of, anybody want to guess? She left it, locked, in the church parking lot, in the baking July heat. The staff had to break open the truck doors to give the animals water. I don't have the answers. Last I saw of them, Patricia and the bunnies were on their way to some poor sucker's place outside Boston. Someone she met at church.