The Bunny Whisperer

I've really been noticing how much folk knowledge is an everyday part of living in a family. For example, just this morning I noticed my wife showing my son how to make a meal he'd never made before. And in the afternoon, I took my 15 year-old son out for his first driving lesson from his dad (he did well). But lately, our home has been filled with lots of lore about rabbits. You see, my wife decided it would be fun to breed rabbits, and this week our Nabooru had her first litter of baby bunnies. Here's a video showing the little critters squirming around in their nesting box:

We have not been figuring out how to breed bunnies by looking online. No, we are lucky enough to have a woman in our neighborhood who knows everything about bunnies and breeds them herself. My wife is constantly on the phone to our "bunny whisperer" getting coached on cages, nesting boxes, gestation cycles, diet, and generally what to expect from the bucks and does.
I have to say it was pretty cool to see the rabbit follow all of the patterns that our neighbor predicted: the number of days she would be pregnant (after the stud service, another fascinating episode that I shall pass over...); the way our mommy bunny would start pulling out her own hair to fill up the nesting box, and how she's caring for the four newborns.

I started looking into ancient pets, and bunnies in particular, and it turns out that they have been pretty popular (see Francis Lazenby, "Greek and Roman Household Pets"). This is a picture of an ancient Greek vase showing a boy playing with his pet bunny. The description of another vase had a boy holding the uncomfortable creature by the ears. Some things never change. I don't know how that Athenian kid was taught to care for his pet. Maybe he had a bunny whisperer down the street like we do, coaching him (or his parents). But I do find it interesting that there were so many scenes of humans with pets preserved from antiquity (and not just among the Greeks). People used one kind of folk knowledge (making pottery) to pass along another -- information about their life with pets.

This has made me realize that our animals are very much tied to our family folklore. You just can't have animals without telling stories about their antics. Stories about experiences with pets have come to be important parts of our family history. We had that cruel spawn-of-Satan pug, Crenshaw. The purebread Maltese dog that I left behind when I went to Canada on a mission, Reginald Little King (yes, he had AKC papers) -- how he got sold by my parents at a garage sale for $5 when they moved. Or there is the story of Encore, our Jack Russell terrier that bit my hand so bad it tore tendons. And don't even get me started on the fish, hamsters, and our brand new choodle (chihuahua-poodle), "Chachi."

Maybe we have pets not because kids need to learn how to take care of living things. Maybe we have pets so we can have stories to tell, and reasons to laugh, cry, and occasionally scream together as a family.