This Dog Won't Hunt

Bedlam Manor.  That's what a friend of ours calls our house.  Sometimes I think she's right.  We have two hunting dogs (English Setters) and a Dutch Rabbit.  Not so unusual, right? Dogs inside. Rabbit outside in a hutch. Not exactly. You see, my wife, Mary, is a pushover when it comes to animals.  We got the dogs first--not one but two (that's another story).  Then came the rabbit. It was abandoned at Maymont Park's petting zoo. An adult, black and white, female Dutch rabbit. Someone had obviously dropped off their unwanted bunny for some reason. We'd been thinking about getting our daughter a rabbit ever since the demise of her hamster. Of course, as soon as our daughter laid eyes on the small black and white bundle of fur, there was no turning back.


A few days later and few hundred dollars poorer our free rabbit was outside in a new hutch the size of Buckingham Palace. Then the weather turned cold as it does in January.  Mary couldn't stand the thought of our poor little Oreo out in the cold. So one evening I was compelled to help wrestle the hundred-fifty pound hutch onto the porch. Then within a few days Mary had decided that Buckingham Palace was too small for our little cotton tail princess.  Our whole screen porch became the rabbit's home--I had no idea that rabbits could be trained to a litter box just like cats. I also discovered that, with the right "encouragement" English Setters could be easily trained not to eat the pet rabbit.


The final slide into bedlam came one evening during dinner.  We were enjoying a nice meal when Mary looked out of the French doors that enter onto the porch.  There peering throught the glass was a forlorn face with a pink twitching nose and perky ears. "Oh, look at her," Mary cried. "Shall we let her in? She looks so cold and lonely." Before I had chance to reply, Oreo happily hopped into the house.  In time, she and I became the best of friends.  She would sit under my chair when I practiced cello and would always hop over to great me in the morning when I came downstairs. Sadly Oreo only lived about a year.


We now have a new rabbit, Rozie, who is even more fun than Oreo. We also have a new dog, Beau, after one of our two died of cancer. So now we have the peaceable kingdom with a house rabbit and two hunting dogs that won't hunt.  Well not the rabbit anyway.