Rabbits

SteveRobinson

exocet said:

I forgot to add that my two rabbis were always drawn to chewing live cables. 

Oi vey!

Flanging_Fred

When I was a kid, I woke up to find that two small white Bunnys had arrived in the kitchen overnight.  My dad had been to some sort of country fair the day/night before. The fair had a raffle and this pair of rabbits was one of the prizes.

But no one wanted them as a prize.  They were New Zealand Whites and were actually intended for the winner to take them home,  kill them and eat them. In a rare moment of sentimentality my dad took them to prevent them being put in a pie.

They grew, and grew and grew and became fucking massive. One was cute and friendly and died pretty sharpish (of natural causes!).

The other one was a vicious fucker and became known as "Nazi rabbit" it was the size of spaniel and terrorized every living thing it came in contact with. It lived for bloody AGES and it was a real reliief when it pissed off to the great watership -down in the sky.

In hindsight a rabbit stew was probably the correct course of action in the first place...

fandango

exocet said:

Rabbits can be a long term commitment.
 

On balance they don't make great pets for small children unless "mum and dad" are prepared to do a lot of the groundwork. Many rabbits that i have seen are dumped outside in a cage and largely ignored. They become bad tempered and agressive which tends to be self defeating.

I suggest to the OP that this is what it comes down to.

@menamestom - that you probably saw this, yet can't keep your word is not a good portent for the future. You'll probably be saying that you won't take responsibility for looking after it, and that the daughter will have to feed & care for the animal. But I'll bet you a guitar that you and the wife will back down on that too.

You'll know when the novelty wears off ... that's when the daughter will want a horse or other status symbol, or start with a boyfriend ... then she'll be going "what rabbit?" Because that's just what this rabbit is - a status symbol to impress daughter's (female) friends - boys won't give a ****. It's a moot point who loses interest first - daughter or her friends. By then you'll have the rabbit and it'll be too late.

So for your own sanity, please stop and think. A guinea pig might be a better solution as suggested by others. Less hassle. You won't have the space or weather issues mentioned by others. And they will be easier to pass on to another family once the boredom sets in with daughter. Even so, I'll still posit daughter will get bored of having the responsibility soon enough, but not as soon as with a rabbit.

No apologies for the strong words.

kin

A lady told me a story about her daughters rabbit shortly after we had bought one for our  daughter.

Apparently she was lying on the floor in front of the tv, when the rabbit launched itself onto her leg, dug in with its claws and proceeded to dry hump her calf extremely vigorously. 

In agony at this point, with blood coursing down her leg, her husband had to drag it off her, the rabbit then bit her husband and tried to remount. It took the husband throwing the rabbit against the wall to dampen it's ardour.

Cue one dazed rabbit, one violated wife , a traumatized child and a husband with bite marks.

Consequently, I had the balls cut off ours at the earliest opportunity...

digitalscream

fandango said:

@menamestom - that you probably saw this, yet can't keep your word is not a good portent for the future. You'll probably be saying that you won't take responsibility for looking after it, and that the daughter will have to feed & care for the animal. But I'll bet you a guitar that you and the wife will back down on that too.

You'll know when the novelty wears off ... that's when the daughter will want a horse or other status symbol, or start with a boyfriend ... then she'll be going "what rabbit?" Because that's just what this rabbit is - a status symbol to impress daughter's (female) friends - boys won't give a ****. It's a moot point who loses interest first - daughter or her friends. By then you'll have the rabbit and it'll be too late.

Precisely. This is what happened with us - my daughter absolutely insisted on getting a rabbit which was a rescue from a testing facility. Swore blind she'd look after it etc.

Three years later, after we'd trusted her to look after it and let it out at least three times a week, feed it etc, we noticed it started looking a bit ill. When pressed on the subject, she hadn't even noticed and hadn't even been feeding the poor bugger more than once a week for a few months...coincidentally, since she got her latest boyfriend.

Me: "If you won't look after him, you'll have to find another home for him. You also need to get him to the vets."
Daughter: "I'm too busy for that, and I'm not spending that sort of money. Can't we just have him put down? He's old anyway."

Fucking marvellous. The rabbit died about a week after that from an illness that would've been easily preventable had we caught it a few months prior, not helped by the fact that he was under-fed and dehydrated.

The point? Nobody believes that they'll say anything like that when they've got the prospect of a new fluffy to play with. Almost every young person who starts off with an obsession with getting any given species ends up not giving a shit a year later.

57Deluxe

#Bright Eyes...#

Axe_meister

Get a puppy.

Dominic

Watch their arseholes for Flystrike.....very common and agonising slow death for Rabbits
Cats will kill Rabbits
Check regularly for ticks
Lettuce gives them terrible squirts and can kill them if they have a lot of it
Must have Hay no matter how much natural vegetation........the roughage keeps their colon intact.
Better in Stews and pies but have had good results on the Barbecue .

munckee

A mate of mine had a rabbit when we were at school, we went to his after school one day and a fox or cat had ripped it to pieces in the garden and we had to pick up the remaining bits, spleen, guts and stuff before his little brother got home.  Would never let my kids have one!

LuttiS

My 22m daughter likes to feed ours... One nugget at a time into the bowl. Takes quite a while each day... 

RandallFlagg

hassleham said:

You should operate a 1-in-1-out system with pets (like most of us have to with guitars?)
As soon as the rabbits move in, get rid of the cats!

Same is true with wives I find.

Funkfingers

menamestom said:

my wife and daughter have now joined forces ... and they demand we rehome a couple of bunnies from somewhere.  

So, what are they like to keep?

Nothing that you need to know about.

Since wife and daughter want the pets, they can take full responsibility for looking after them. Your only involvement would be the bills.

EricTheWeary

Funkfingers said:

menamestom said:

my wife and daughter have now joined forces ... and they demand we rehome a couple of bunnies from somewhere.  

So, what are they like to keep?

Nothing that you need to know about.

Since wife and daughter want the pets, they can take full responsibility for looking after them. Your only involvement would be the bills.

That’s ducks you are thinking about. 

Iamnobody

Some good advice here - I can’t think of any ‘child's’ rabbit that hasn’t been left for the parents to deal with eventually.

See if you can get an old one that will die quicker...

Losing pets is a good life lesson for kids and prepares them for the enevitable Grandma/Grandad or other family human passing. 

Sporky

Rabbits are pretty ace. The worst aspect of having them is all the people who think it's terribly funny to talk about killing and eating your pets - quite a few of those here as you'll have seen. Strangely they don't have the same sense of humour when you make the same comment about their kids.

menamestom

Thanks for the tips folks.

So other than being leg fucking biting, kicking, raping grumpy cunts who will end up my problem for the next 13 years ( if their heads are not chewed up by the cats )

are they OK?

fandango

Sporky said:

Rabbits are pretty ace. The worst aspect of having them is all the people who think it's terribly funny to talk about killing and eating your pets - quite a few of those here as you'll have seen. Strangely they don't have the same sense of humour when you make the same comment about their kids.

@Sporky - I wasn't talking about killing "pets". And how can you equate children ("kids") to bunny rabbits? That's a pretty big jump. You missed your tablets this morning? 

My comments stems from the fact that rabbit stew was a genuine feature on our family dinner plates when I was younger. Back then rabbit was readily available in supermarkets, yet it's now impossible to find. The rabbit stew my mother made was as delicious as anything else she put before us (despite the bones).

What you, like most townies, may not realise, is that rabbits are a pest. Farmers detest the damage they do to crops, and I've seen first hand the damage they've done to my garden. The little fokkers. They are as bad as rats and foxes. But in a different way.

Sorry to burst your bubble.

Phil_aka_Pip

fandango said:

Back then rabbit was readily available in supermarkets, yet it's now impossible to find.

Apparently Sainsburys only started stocking it because of the line in the Chas & Dave song that said You've got more rabbit than Sainsbury's, and folk were going into Sainsbury's to ask for rabbit.

I quite like rabbit. It's a bit like eating chicken, only pinker.

Funkfingers

Sporky said:

Strangely, they don't have the same sense of humour when you make the same comment about their kids.

If you believe some of my neighbours, I eat a baby for breakfast every morning. Bwa-ha-ha-haaaa!

Hattigol

You can train rabbits to go 'woof'.
I say 'train', what I actually mean is that you have to cover them in petrol and chuck a match on them....