Okay so we had cats. And we had chickens. And at one time, during Disney’s run of Charlotte’s Web I had a rat, who I named Templeton. He was a big black and white rat who we kept outside and he was very tame. But he did die, inexplicably, after owning him a couple of months.
And we had rabbits. At first my brother and I each had a pet rabbit. We cuddled and played with them but after a while they got too big and they were just petted in the cage, fed and watered. Then my mother tried to breed them. She got a breeder box, read up that you had to put the female into the males cage (or the other way… I forget) or the female would fight him, etc. I think she may have had success with my female rabbit Sunflower, so she decided to get a pair of huge meat rabbits. And each rabbit has its unique story.
One day, Sunflower died. While I was crying over the death of my pet (even though I wasn’t particularly attached to her) my mother who was in RN school had gathered my brother, sister and several of the neighbor kids and was using the opportunity to do a little dissection class for them. So I was in the house “waaaaaa, Sunflower” while my mother was in the backyard, “Now this is the small intestine.” She drags it up and out the body. “And this is the large intestine… no Erin don’t poke that, it’s the colon.” Gasps and squeals of “ewww” as my sister does just that and the stench of rabbit poop spreads.
And another day one of our rabbit’s eyes began to bulge in its socket. Penny-Pinching Paul (my father) is SO not going to pay for a vet visit so we speculate as this eye bulge grows that the poor rabit must have a brain tumor. By now my mother is employed as a PNP in a Pediatrician’s office and she brings home some morphine from the office and shoots up the rabbit with enough to take out a dog and gently leaves him in our small patch of grass to die free.
My brother comes home from school and calls my mom. “Mom, what’d you do to the rabbit?” She explains and he laughs.
“Mom, rabbit ain’t dead. Rabbit is STONED, totally stoned.. Flying high!”
Not only did the rabbit live, whatever was bulging his eye disappeared. Although after that he did have a crazy habit of running around his cage so fast he would run up the sides for a full circle. Mother could only assume someone at the office had tampered with the morphine. Us kids just assumed she had accidentally discovered a cure for cancer.
The last rabbit story is the tale of the Baby Bunnies.
My mother finally successfully bread the big white meat rabbits. So while I was in high school we had 6 of the cutest little baby rabbits and we would visit the and cuddle them every day. Ezzy and her yearly kittens had died and we missed the cuddly baby stuff.
Then one day we came home from school and the baby bunnies were gone. We queried my mother who informed us she took them to the butcher because she wasn’t raising ‘cute’ rabbits she was raising MEAT rabbits.
Oh we soooo harassed her about that.
Two weeks later we have fried chicken. My brother says, “Mom, this is funny tasting chicken.”
She replies, “That’s because its rabbit.”
And we all know what she means, its the baby bunnies. My sister runs screaming from the room. My brother announces to my mother, “your sick” and leaves the table.
And me. Well, I continue eating after I tell her, “Tastes a lot like chicken.”