The Frozen Bunny

In honor of Easter which always seems to be accompanied by bunnies and chickens and bunnies that cluck...

We had lots of animals growing up. Most of which weren't pets. Included in the category of 'not pets' were the rabbits. Them was fer eatin'. I am not a fan of the rabbit meat, quite possibly because taking care of them was one of my chores and I knew all their names.

Rabbits breed like, well, rabbits. So we had lots of them. Mostly Dad tried to control the birth rate but every once in a while a couple of them would get out and get busy ... And if we didn't know one was pregnant we wouldn't also know to put a box in its cage. Which means that we lost a lot of little baby rabbits. Sometimes to the monther who, like all rodents, ate off their heads*, and sometimes to cold.

On one of these occasions my sister Bernadette rescued one of the dead. Bernadette's wanted to go into medicine for as long as I can remember and she wanted to put the dead bunny in a jar with formaldehyde. Until said fromaldehyde could be fetched the bunny went into a Ziplock freezer bag and went into one of the deep freezers. Stopping somewhere on his way home from work to get the fromaldehyde was not high on my dad's list of things to remember so the bunny lived in the deep freezer for a pretty long time. We, being the extremely sick children our parents raised us to be, got it out every once in a while.

We'd wait for company to come over then sneak out the bunny when no one noticed. Then we'd cup it in our hand, stroke it, and approach the poor unsuspecting person and say something like "One of our rabbits just had babies. Do you want to see it?" Almost always the answer was yes and was accompanied but some sort of cooing.

Then as the poor innocent mind reached out for the bunny we'd toss it him. 

The cries of shock and horror and scrambling to try to catch the dead rabbit were always hilarity inducing. And when the person didn't catch it, or did but dropped it after the shock of the cold weight registered, the very very frozen rabbit would thunk on the ground and clatter a little bit.

The looks of reproof and awesome horror only egged on our laughter. We were never repentant and it probably didn't help any that our parents looked on such antics with fond patronism. A friend of mine refers to my parent's home as 'the dark farm' but I prefer to think that we simply grew up with a healthy knowledge and understanding of death.

Interestingly enough people still want to see that baby whatever we have at the moment. Granted the baby whatever is almost always alive now though. Maybe it's time to put the fear back into people. I shall have to think on this.

*Rodents often eat their young. There are numerous reasons for this but for some reason, if the mother is not able to see the young, said young are safe. This is one of the reason that our rabbit breeding boxes were full boxes that allowed little light to enter. I had hamsters once and one got pregnant and I woke up one day to watch her eating the babies. It was quite traumatizing.