Bad Bunnies . . . and the Humans Who Love Them

The young woman propped her right leg up on a bag of dog chow, yanking up pants cuff to reveal a 6-inch gash running up the inside of her calf. "Twenty stitches," she was saying, "and all I did was try to clean his cage! And I think he was . . . well . . . GROWLING!"

"Yeah, he's always been a troublemaker," the petshop manager replied, shaking his head. "He's just a bad bunny. I was surprised anyone ended up buying him. We had to separate him 'cause he was always going after his litter mates. . ."

The subject of the discussion, a large fluffy white rabbit, looked harmless enough. With his eye shut tight and long silky ears resting comfortably against his back, he was snuggled peacefully against the manager's chest, sound asleep. He didn't seem all that dangerous, but I grabbed my bag of woodchips from the counter and made a speedy exit. Bad bunnies. They look so soft and cuddly, so innocent! But don't let them fool you. Rabbits have their dark side. Esther, my first, was quite mild-mannered. In our 9 years together she never nipped or attempted to attack anybody - not even her roommate, Buffy (a guinea pig), who made it painfully clear she wanted no part of the long-earred intruder. Esther greeted me by running in tight circles around my feet - a friendly gesture, but sometimes treacherous when she hopped around me on the stairs. Still, she was just showing her affection - at least I think that's what she was showing.

Esther did have her dark side. How can I put it delicately . . . she had a shoe fetish. It became more pronounced in her old age when I frequently found her hiding in my closet, snuggled against a shoe she'd swiped. More than once she kept me awake till dawn wrestling with an assortment of footwear in the dark. She also had a somewhat unhealthy attachment to a couple of my sundresses. I almost caught her once poking through one of my bureau drawers. Was she secretely a cross-species dresser? The evidence was convincing. But some dark corners of a rabbit's psyche are probably best left unexplored.

Lilith, one of my current bunnies, is quite a bookworm. She could spend half the day browsing through my bookshelves. She's sampled quite a number of the books unfortunate enough to reside on the lower two shelves and eaten the entire cover off two or three of her particular favorites. Anything she finds offensive, she simply pushes off to the floor, where her sister, Eve, helps out by shredding as many pages as she can before I rescue the unfortunate victim.

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