The Urinating Rabbit
I've owned three rabbits in my life. The third one is the one I remember most vividly.
Sidney was an acrobat. He did amazing flips and twists in the air in his cage. I admired and appreciated him for this. But Sidney did little more than chew alfalfa all day. Gymnastics was his second love.
My rabbit sometimes escaped. He jumped so high and so hard he pushed the top lid up and off and ran. When he was in the house, my sisters and I had to find him and entrap him in some way. And when we were outdoors, he'd immediately run across front lawn after front lawn, until he quickly cleared eight to ten of them. Sometimes he crossed so many lawns, he'd wind up a quarter of a mile away. We had no choice but to sit and wait for him to come back. Even then, we had to track him down and catch him.
The rabbit sometimes bit me with his cute, crooked little teeth, mostly when I picked him up. This was unpredictable and painful. He was still a "wild" rabbit, I thought, even though he had a distinct black and white pattern familiar to those who collected rabbits. He was especially bred to look this way in order to appeal to customers. I didn't care what Sidney looked like. I was interested only in his personality and his heart. Biting me, though, did not show me much heart.
Sidney would urinate in one small corner of his cage, I supposed, to keep the rest of his living quarters clean. Many people know that a rabbit conserves water so that their piss is mostly ammonia. The stench of urine in my room was pungent and overwhelming. It burned my nostrils.
My mother and I decided to do a thorough cleaning of Sidney's cage one day. We cleared the cedar chips away and saw that the thick yellow pee had soaked through the carpet. We lifted the rug and saw that the urine had also burned through the underrug. The piss was absorbed into the wooden floor beneath the layers of carpeting.
I decided that because the rabbit had destroyed my flooring - not to mention having to pick up untold masses of rabbit pellets every day - that these particular animals did not make good pets. But I kept Sidney until his old age and ultimate death. I cried when I lost him. But still, I never got another pet rabbit, and I'm not planning on it anytime soon.
