Rascally Rabbits
Or, "Operation Epic Furry (no, not that kind!)"
I’m sure you like rabbits. I used to like them too.
I liked their cute, fluffy selves as they nibbled on the clover growing in our backyard. My wife and I would look out of our bedroom window, see an adorable little bunny hopping around looking for veggie snacks, and let out a collective “AWWW!”
For a while, we even discussed having a rabbit as a pet. The only thing that stopped us was their biologically necessary coprophagia; the requirement that they digest their food twice by…well, use your imagination. I can put up with a lot of things from a pet. Just ask our cockapoo, Frazier. He has cost us egregious amounts of dollars in medical care over his 6 years of life, including care for seizures that requires twice-daily medication. He still gets hugs. If he ever ate his own leavings, he would be rehomed.
But I digress.
My affection for rabbits began to be tested in the spring of this year, when my wife watched a particularly athletic rabbit leap into our raised garden bed. A couple of years ago, my wife and I built an enclosed, raised garden bed, with a door, in which we grow herbs and vegetables (and fruits, if you count tomatoes and peppers as fruits). It’s normal for this garden bed to start sprouting weeds before we prep it for that May’s planting. Evidently, this was too tempting for this cottontail, who slipped in via the cracked-open door.
We watched him in amusement, which gave way to the realization that, unless this was the LeBron James of rabbits, who was dared by the other rabbits to make the 3-foot high jump, our garden was in danger. We sent Frazier out to the bed to, as they say, kick the rabbit “out of the club”. Our happy little bouncer did his job, causing the rabbit to panic and sprint out of the garden space.
We took steps to secure the door to the bed area, and thankfully this has held.
At least until rabbits learn about ladders.
This summer, my wife and I’s attitude towards rabbits changed from tolerance to active…not quite hatred, but close.
This summer, the rabbits seem to have more chutzpah than past years. My wife plants an expanse of beautiful flowers each spring, and one multiple occasions, we have come out to see our blooms annihilated, with a guilty-looking cottontail a few yards away. The petunia have been their favorite, with each plant being eaten down to stem, and eventually completely unearthed and the root consumed as well.
They’ve moved on to other plants as well, feasting upon coneflowers, decorative grasses, and other flowers in our garden plot. A once-accepted member of our little backyard ecosystem has become a certified pest, in a similar way that a once-cute baby turns into a savage toddler that shakes down strangers for snacks.
Mitigation methods have been discussed. Our first line of defense, shouting “Get away from the flowers!” at the offending rabbit was met with disrespectful non-compliance. I swear one of them looked at me and raised his paw, with a middle toe raised. I was flipped the bird by a rabbit.
Our second method, unleashing our cockapoo to chase down the bunnies when they ventured too close to our flowers, was effective at causing them to scatter, but not as a deterrent. Our pup is athletic; at least compared to the geriatric pug that preceded him, but his top speed is far below the escape velocity of a Michigan cottontail.
Frustrated, I brought up guns - upon review of our local laws, this was discouraged. As was falconry and aerial bombardment. Unlike some Persian conflicts, this battle had rules we had to abide by.
We planted supposed rabbit-proof plants in a protective arc around our precious petunias. The rabbits, having taken basic geometry, bisected the arc and nibbled away, laughing at our impotence.
Our latest strategy has been rabbit-mace, sprayed on our plants to dissuade the rabbits from eating the plants it has been sprayed on. Early signs are promising, but we’ll see if some bad bunny treats it as seasoning instead of a deterrent.
So far, nothing has definitively worked. But we love flowers, so we’ll keep at it.
Because war, against rabbits, never changes.
