Talia's Dance of Joy

Woke up early this morning and decided to take a couple of bunnies outside for some fresh air and playtime, before this hateful climate kicks in and the temperature screams into triple-digits again. My Flemish Giant girl Peaches always gets to run free in the yard; she needs the exercise but rarely gets it, preferring as she does to park her ample tushie under a bougainvillea bush and contemplate her plans for world domination. I have an exercise pen on the back patio and I like to bring another of the bunnies outside for a little fun-time. This morning it was Talia's turn.
Talia is an incredibly sweet little agouti-brown girl, about 6-8 months old with a huge fluffy white-on-the-bottom tail and completely adorable helicopter ears. When she came to the rabbit rescue about a month ago I could barely believe what I saw. Apparently she had been bitten in the face by another animal and the wound had gotten horrendously infected. The whole left side of her face was swollen and misshapen, and there was so much pus in her face it was starting to leak upwards through her tear duct and out her eye. I had never seen an infection so bad and out of control. I took pictures of her when she first came to me but I hesitate to publish one in this blog because they are so hard to look at. Trust me when I tell you she looked truly awful and I can't imagine the pain and discomfort she had to live with for God knows how long.

Talia ended up staying at the animal hospital for over three weeks, as they did several surgeries on her to reconstruct her eyelids and clean out all the infection and prurient material. Finally she was released and came back to our rescue, and I went up earlier this week to scoop her up and bring her to my home for some much-deserved spoiling and TLC. Miraculously, she has not lost vision in her left eye.

Despite all she has gone through Talia is still an extremely happy, trusting bunny. As I sat on my patio enjoying the (temporary) coolness of the morning, Talia could not contain herself and started a very extended performance of the Rabbit Dance of Joy, or "binky" as it is known technically. She scampered and frolicked around her exercise pen, running in and out and around the cut-out cardboard box I put in there. There was a lot of happy jumping, spinning in the air and kicking-up of heels. She stood up high on her back legs, telescoping her body as much as possible to sniff the spring breezes and see as far as she could. After nearly an hour of that she calmed down just a little bit and spent time diligently examining the inside of her cardboard shelter. Just now she flopped down on the bottom of the pen, kicking her back legs fully out behind her. But after a minute or two she will jump up again and start her happy dancing anew, punctuating each move with a sideways hop and a sassy shake of her floppy ears.

Seeing her in such a state of unbridled joy brings me a great deal of happiness and satisfaction. Knowing how she looked when she came to us and seeing her now so full of joy and life, it makes me eternally grateful for groups like Brambley Hedge Rabbit Rescue whose mission it is to take severely mistreated rabbits such as Talia and literally give them a second chance at life. I don't know what her final veterinarian bill will be, but I'm sure it will be staggering. Without the care she received through BHRR, it is very doubtful she would be alive right now. That BHRR will spend that kind of money to give an innocent little creature another chance to run, jump, spin and dance again is to me one of the miracles of existence that make life worthwhile.

I'm not going off on a rant again about how stupid, evil, loathsome and detestable human beings are, especially the ones that put Talia in such an horrible situation and then dumped her off at the animal shelter with a terse "We don't want her anymore!" and a $3 donation. If I had a dollar for every time I wanted to go postal on some ignorant human being for being a cruel, swinish dirtbag I would be typing this blog from my villa on the Cote d'Azur and Stevie Nicks would be serving me cocktails with little paper parasols in them. I just hope that karma comes down on those people with the weight of a thousand blazing suns, and they have to experience the pain of being discarded like a piece of trash, which is actually better than they deserve. Talia will always have some physical scars from her ordeal; if she has any mental scars, I can't tell what they are. Rabbits can be so incredibly, unbelievably resilient in the wake of horrific, heartless cruelty and ignorance. If only humans could be one-tenth as noble.

As for me, I'm just going to watch Talia dance and hop and binky in the morning breeze, and think of happier things.