hermitgeecko

It looked like spring outside as I came home today (thank you, O springmakers!) It was warm and green and everything. I took Thula out for an hour or so -- set up her crate without its floor in the backyard so she could smell the wind and nibble the grass. The whole prospect seemed to scare her at first, which was sad, because it was supposed to be fun for her, but she settled down after a while.

Going to bed now.

Why write about my bunny so much? I don't know. Part of it is because I remember how she was when we first met one another, terrified and hesitant, and later much too angry to be touched.

We sat together tonight and there was much petting. She usually wants to stay an arm's-length away... she doesn't want to be crowded. That's all right. I understand that. But she does want to be petted, and I understand that, too. It makes me glad.

When I got up to go, she jumped up, did a little wiggle to get my attention, and chased after me. I know "please stay a bit longer" when I see it.

My rabbit loves me. I love her. I'm so happy that I got her, and I won't ever give her up.

There was a feather floating in Thula's water bowl this morning. A little white downy one.

Thula, did you eat a bird, dear?

(Editor's note: this doubtlessly fell from the nest that is stashed in a corner of the balcony roof. Still a bit odd.)

Two days ago, on a whim, I stripped a spray of leaves off the tree next to us and tossed it into Thula's cage. I figured it couldn't do any harm, and it might amuse her.

Good idea: She loved it. She ate it, twig and all.

Bad idea: She figured out where it came from. Since then, she has decided that her true calling was to be a giraffe and the bunny fur is just a disguise. Whenever she is loose from her cage, she shoves her head through one of the slots and grazes on leaves from the tree. This is terribly cute... but now I'm scared that, if loose from her cage and unobserved, she may get desperate for leafy nibbles and hop the balcony divider.

Hrrm.

I wonder if I could buy a non-toxic plant that would survive being bunny breakfast on a regular basis. (Probably not, unless she goes for kudzu.)

I'm training Thula with carrots now. She seems to be MUCH happier about carrot-training than apple or banana -- how odd! I can't do it in chunks, either, it requires the whole carrot. It's sort of like sticking it in a pencil sharpener -- she doesn't stop to swallow.

Anyway, Thula doesn't get her dinner carrot unless she is willing to put her forefeet on my knee or leg while she eats it. I'm working on encouraging lap rabbit behavior (and calm being-carried-around behavior). When she's blase about that, then I'll work on encouraging her to let me pick up her forefeet with my arm while she eats carrot.

It's ironic that I'm training a rabbit to be on people, considering how much time and energy my mother spends trying to get her dogs to stay off people.

She's been awfully social lately. I am happy.

On the up side, Thula seems to be settling in well. We're permitted to pet her again and she does binkie.

On the up side, Thula has begun to enthusiastically eat banana from my hand.

On the down side, "enthusiastically" isn't quite the word -- "aggressively" probably is! Who the hell knew that rabbits GROWL? She growled at me when I accidentally dropped some banana and tried to pick it back up. HER BANANA! She might be a small bunny, but she definitely wants me to know that she can kick my hairless ass.

Thula, honey, get a grip, will you? Your mercurial moods are making me understand what it must be like to date me.

P.S. The little red cat icon for "giggly" is very boring.

For the first few days, Thula thought we were really super.

Now she actively seems to dislike me. For the last three days, every time I let her out, she has gone immediately into a dark corner and avoided me at all costs.

I am hoping it is the time of day. I feel horrible.

I don't think she can be overly scared because she's stretching out in her dark corner, not just huddling there. But it's awfully dismaying.

And this, of course, means that I am the bringer of only bad things (crate cleaning, being picked up) and mediocre things (food) rather than being the bringer of good things (toys, play).

I'm hoping that what's going on is that we're disrupting her sleep schedule inadvertently -- it seems as though dawn and dusk are her sleep time, and as though she's most active around noon and midnight. If so, we need to adjust a bit, and she needs to adjust a bit, and then things will be better.

But it's harsh to come home after a long day at work to your brand new, totally beloved pet, and have her want absolutely nothing to do with you and express her utter disgust with you (foot flicking, etc.)

Meh.

I can't deliberately get up at midnight just to hang out with my rabbit.

We are getting to know our rabbit a bit better.

She does not want to be more than 2 inches off the ground at any time. I can hold her for a surprising amount of time at 2 inches off the ground as long as I do not move her horizontally or vertically. Movement in either direction produces a massive freakout. I am wondering whether she was dropped by her former family, but it would be impolitic to ask, considering that I got her from my sign language instructor. M'love can pick her up and carry her around, but he does this entirely by what he calls the "recalcitrant cat" method -- which is to say by holding her around the chest with no leg support whatsover. It seems to work, but I don't like the way it looks. I'd like to find a better way.

She is not a jumper. Any barrier that she can't step over disgusts her. On the up side, this means she will never break a limb falling off some high place that she jumped up to inappropriately. On the down side, this means she will never be a couch-cuddler.

Also, she hates the smell of Feline Pine (a rabbit-safe kitty litter). I wish we hadn't bought $14 of the stuff. We're trying shredded brown paper bags in the litterbox next, since we had some and she plainly will not tolerate Feline Pine. And it's now a litter tray, because the litterbox's three-inch-high lip required a bounce to enter, which grossed her out. Another $6 gone.

She adores the crate rug. A towel will substitute if necessary, but what she really wants is the crate rug. When she is litterbox-trained, she will have much more opportunity to snuggle on the crate rug in our absence. For now, after far too much laundry in the 3 days that she's been with us, she is crate-rug-less and also towel-less when we are gone.

She does not like having me mess with her crate. I get the most unhappy looks every time I clean it.

She will not accept treats. This is seriously weird. Being a dog trainer's daughter, I had secretly hoped to train my rabbit to a few simple commands (come, home, sit). I've tried both small pieces of banana and apple at this point, and she will neither accept them from my hand nor eat them if they are placed on the ground in front of her. They vanish when placed in her bowl overnight, but with about the same enthusiasm she offers to broccoli (which is to say, not a ton.) Of the various foods she has eaten here (timothy hay, pellets, broccoli, carrot greens, carrot bottoms, apple, and banana) she most seems to enjoy corrugated cardboard, which we didn't deliberately feed her. After cardboard, she likes timothy hay and carrot greens. She won't eat either one unless it has been at least 2 minutes since it last touched a person. People are yucky, I guess.

She likes playing chase. This is also bizarre. She doesn't really want you to CHASE, but she wants you to reach for her, and then she wants to run away and then run back. We finally figured out it was a game because she wandered off to sulk if we failed to reach for her. The lop body language, as feared, is giving us a little bit of trouble.

The worst body language problem we are having is that we cannot read her body language well enough yet to tell the difference between perfectly acceptable sitting versus peeing/defecating. It's the same position! Aiyee. I stuck the FelinePine litterbox in her favorite place to pee inappropriately in hopes that she will knock it off.

She is home and renamed. Due to the way her whiskers fan out and forward around her nose, she has been named "Thula"... a feminine derivative of "Cthulhu".

We're pretty sure that Thula is a lop mix -- her ears droop down the sides of her head, like a lop, but they are the length of non-lop rabbit ears. She is greyish-brown with subtle, pretty patterns. She's about a foot long when she stretches out and weighs maybe 6 - 8 pounds. (She's a bit overweight, but she doesn't look overweight, she looks immense! It's due to the winter coat, since she used to be an outdoor bunny.)

She has eaten some timothy hay and (thus far) turned her nose up at pellets. We originally intended to only let her explore the kitchen, but the linoleum scared her to death, so we let her jaunt around the living room. The braided crate rug I got her is a GREAT success -- she treated it as "home base" during her explorations, and it gives her more security of footing in the crate. The pellets are less successful, but there will be time. She likes our TV stand; it has two compartments, and there's nothing in the bottom compartment, so she hung out in there for a while. She's miffed that she can't dig through the wood.

Off to buy vegetables for the bunny. Have a great day!