Peaches at the Bridge

Last Monday I had to say goodbye to my beautiful Flemish Giant girl Peaches.  She didn't want to go, and I didn't want her to leave me, but her body said it was time.  Reluctantly, she crossed over to the Rainbow Bridge.  I was holding her in my arms and am confident she knew I was there, helping her make the transition to the next world.

Peaches came into my life in 2005, after a hoarding situation in the Show Low area of Arizona sent a number of Flemish Giant rabbits to our shelter.  She got her name from the bright orange-tan color of her fur.  Flemish Giants, or "Flemmies" as they are affectionately called, are one of the largest breeds of rabbits.  The purebred males can sometimes get to be 20 or 22 pounds in size, and can measure nearly three feet in length when stretched out.  Peaches wasn't a purebred, but in her prime she tipped the scales at 15 pounds, a very respectable weight for a bunny.  By the way, the internet stories you sometimes come across where someone claims to have a 50-lb. rabbit are most likely bogus.  A rabbit's skeleton and physiology could not support that kind of weight, and the rabbit would be unable to move around.

Peaches in 2005

I didn't adopt Peaches right away.  For a while she was up for adoption, along with the other Flemmies she came with.  Flemish Giants are very popular rabbits, due to their large size and sweet, loving, gentle personalities.  We don't get them very often at the shelter and when we do, they usually get adopted quickly.  I was fostering Peaches for a while and took notice of her sweet disposition and excellent litterbox habits, a winning combination in the eyes of any prospective bunny adopter.

It wasn't long before a woman came forward to adopt Peaches, and Peaches went to live in her new home.  Not long thereafter, the woman contacted me and reported that Peaches is acting very strangely - urinating all over the place except her litter box, hiding behind a stairwell whenever she was let out of her pen for playtime, and generally behaving badly.  The woman had a male roommate and Peaches loved him, but she would have nothing to do with the woman who adopted her.  I tried to give her advice on how to counteract Peaches' recalcitrant behavior, and even went over to the woman's house to work with them, but Peaches just dug in her bunny heels and would not change her antisocial behavior for anything.  Eventually the woman could not deal with the constant urination and reluctantly returned Peaches to the rescue.  I went to her home, picked up Peaches and brought her back to foster care in my house.  The minute Peaches got to my house, the bad behavior vanished, her perfect litter box habits returned, and I realized that Peaches was finally back to where she really wanted to be.  I officially adopted her soon after, and she had not left my care since.

Peaches snuggling with mini-Rex Marty in 2011

Peaches loved to go out in the back yard for playtime when the weather permitted.  I have memories of her joyfully bounding across the back yard, kicking up her heels and leaping into the air in what bunny people call the Rabbit Dance of Joy, otherwise known as a "binky."  She would launch her 15-pound bulk straight up and catch some really good air, kicking up a cloud of dust as she did.  Once she was outside, she never wanted to go back inside the house, and not even the darkening skies of evening would change her mind.  She quickly learned that if she hid under some shrubbery in the yard, it was hard for me to force her back inside.  In particular, a large bougainvillea bush next to the cement block wall was her favorite hangout, because she could observe the whole yard without being seen, and the hundreds of sharp thorns would make it a difficult and painful proposition for me to drag her out of her very comfortable spot to go back indoors.

In the 8 years I had her, Peaches was never anything other than extremely sweet, docile and affectionate.  Her health was really good throughout her life, although once she had a case of urine sludge that was very severe.  Her urine got really thick with excess calcium and minerals in her diet, and came out of her body with the consistency of toothpaste.  She was very sick and at times her body was completely limp, but luckily I pulled her through that and made changes to her diet, and she was fine from then on.  About 6 months ago she had trouble walking around, and was losing the use of her back legs.  Eventually her back legs did go out on her and I had to move her from the exercise pen where she had lived her whole life to a cage lined with soft, fleece padding.

I could tell she got really depressed when this happened, because she had always been so active and vital.  She was sad that she couldn't move on her own, and I helped as much as I could by keeping her clean, holding her over her water dish so she could drink and changing her position several times a day.  She still loved to eat her vegetables and treats, and she would yank a treat out of your hand with as much gusto as she always did (ask my friend Julia).  Last weekend things started to get really bad for her, and she began losing her appetite, a sure sign of her decline.  By Monday morning, she was virtually paralyzed, her food left untouched.  I knew the end was near for my dear girl.

I was able to spend a lot of time with her on Monday - holding her, brushing her beautiful fur, and letting her know I was nearby.  Monday evening she started crying and moaning, and I knew the end was imminent.  She did not want to go, and fought very hard to stay with me, even though I told her over and over it was okay if she needed to move on.  Tears started to form in her eyes, and in mine, too.  Eventually she realized it was time and when she surrendered her spirit, a palpable wave of relief crossed over her face.  She relaxed a final time, and she was gone.

I am still dealing with the loss of my dear girl, and I don't think it's fully hit me yet.  I keep walking by the bunny room expecting to see her there, her big, dark eyes sparkling under her long, long eyelashes and her huge ears pointed directly at me in anticipation of a treat I might have for her.  I will think of her every time I'm sitting on the back patio, gazing out into the back yard at her favorite bougainvillea bush on the side, expecting to see her stretched out underneath it like Cleopatra on her barge.

When an animal touches your life and your heart as much as she had, she never really leaves you.  One of the amazing things about having animals in your life is that they change you.  They bring such goodness of spirit into your life, that you can't help but be a different (read: better) person from the experience.  I've always maintained that animals make us better human beings, and show us by example how to live our lives.  Animals can teach us so much, if we only open our hearts and minds to them, and I know my life was made immeasurably richer by the presence of a big, beautiful tan-colored Flemmie named Peaches.

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The day after Peaches passed, I got a call from the local humane society.  They had received a young, injured bunny and needed to know if our shelter could take it from them.  Of course I immediately went down there to pick the bunny up.

I was not quite prepared to find a tiny, incredibly soft ball of the purest, whitest fur imaginable, barely weighing a pound and probably no more than 5 weeks of age, with an eye injury.  The doctors there said the eye itself was intact, just the conjunctive tissues surrounding it were damaged.  Her thin, fragile body was covered with numerous scabs, indicating that her life had been a difficult one so far.  That was bad enough, but unfortunately I came to realize that the poor little soul had suffered some critical internal trauma, because she was passing blood out her anus.  I gave her as much supportive care as I could, but knew that only time would tell if she was going to survive her injuries.  I keep telling myself that having hope in situations like this is important for both me and the bunny being treated.

The next morning she was even more listless and lethargic, refusing food and water, and I became increasingly pessimistic about her chances.  Sadly her injuries overwhelmed her and she passed away quietly in the afternoon, less than 24 hours after I brought her to my home.

She was not going to die alone and unnamed, an anonymous victim of the ignorance and cruelty for which the human race is so infamous.  Droplet was a tiny, sweet angel who deserved so much better than the extremely short, brutal, pain-filled life she had to endure.  I like to think that for the last day of her life, Droplet knew she was safe and maybe for the first time, experienced the caring touch of a human who held her close and whispered into her ear that she was loved, she was valued, and her life indeed meant something.

My Day In Hell

It's time to gather the kiddies and the old people and the pets around the computer monitor, and settle in for a tale of nearly unparalleled awfulness and tribulation.  Yesterday was probably one of the worst days I've ever had to get through, and I'm still reeling from the head-spinning shock.  I'll keep the ugly details down to a minimum, since there is so much to slog through, but for now, suffice to say that day was a constant, dizzying stream of the truly wonderful and the truly awful.  So pour yourself a big ol' glass of battery acid, because it was definitely "one of those days."

Actually things started to get weird the previous day, Wednesday.  It started with an abandoned rabbit call at a run-down apartment building in north Phoenix.  It seems that some tenants moved out in the middle of the night and left their two rabbits to fend for themselves on a second-floor patio.  I'm not going to start on the kind of vile human detritus that would do that to a couple of rabbits they had as pets.  I guess for some people it's impossible to form an emotional bond with anything, and that is probably the worst punishment anyone could endure, living life without love and caring for anything other than your own worthless piece-of-shit existence.  Anyway, the people who called had no idea what to do and had no means of transporting them to the Humane Society, where they could be cared for.  So I said I would run a taxi service and take them.  The two bunnies were youngsters, one black and the other black and white, and were extremely friendly and sweet.  How someone could turn their backs on them and walk away without any concern for their welfare is so far beyond my comprehension I have no words.

After that was done, I got a call from one of our foster caregivers, Nancy, who was fostering Tilly and her four babies for Brambley Hedge.  It seems her home's air conditioning went out, something you definitely DON'T WANT to happen in Phoenix in July, and I had to get Tilly and her brood out.  I went to pick them up, and I also took in her 8-week-old kitten she is fostering.  The kitten is black with gold and green eyes, and just a bundle of limitless energy and play.  Little Krazy Kat thinks my pet doves are really fascinatng and particular my dove Lily, who has free range in the house.  Kitteh thinks Lily is the Best Thing Ever.  I haven't had a kitten in my house for a very long time and I had almost forgotten how much fun they can be.  Except when they wake up at 4am and won't stop meowing.  More on that later.

Late that evening around 11pm, when I was getting ready for bed, a monsoon storm kicked in outside and the rain started coming down and the wind started howling.  Monsoon storms can be violent and unpredictable, and this one was a doozy, with loud, crashing thunder and extreme lightning.  I was watching it out the front window when an enormous blast of lightning struck.  The entire sky turned a brilliant, emerald green for a split second, something I had never seen before, and it hit near a utility pole on the other side of my back fence, causing a power transformer to blow up.  There was a really loud explosion, and the entire block was plunged into blackness.  Losing all power is also something that you NEVER EVER want to deal with in the middle of summer.  When that happened, the first words out of my mouth were, "I am SO screwed."  I had no idea how true that would be.

So here I am in the sweltering darkness, unable to do much of anything.  I did go around and made sure the rabbits and the kitten were secured, and just had to wait it out.  I called the local electric company and they gave a restoration estimate of 3am.  It was too hot to stay in bed, so I tried laying on the ceramic tile floor in my bedroom.  It was the only way to stay cool, but sleep was impossible.  Around 1am the houses across the street got power back, but my side of the street is on a separate electrical grid, and we stayed in darkness.  Turns out, getting power back early wouldn't have made a bit of difference.

Three A.M. came around with no change, so I called the electric company and now they said 5am restoration.  Great, I thought, but really there was no choice.  I couldn't sleep and was starting to get headaches, backaches and leg cramps.  Bitch whine moan, I know, but you try sleeping on a hard floor for five hours and see how you feel.

Around 4am Kitteh woke up and did not know where she was, and started a constant meowing which continued until 7am.  I was starting to think I had died and gone to hell at some point.  Morning also brought a realization that my recycling bin, which I had placed out by the street for Thursday collection, had been knocked over and my trash had been blown up and down the whole street.

It began to get light outside and this long, horrendous night was coming to an end, but not before I noticed that the strong winds had ripped one of my garage doors nearly entirely off.  While I was fixing that, power was finally restored at 7:15am, and I thought I might be home free. But when I turned on the air conditioning - nothing.  It wouldn't start, almost like it had no power.  I ran back and forth desperately from the side of the house where the A/C unit was to my back patio where the circuit breakers were and could find nothing wrong.  I began to panic since I had over 20 rabbits in my house and the temperature was only going to go up from that point, and without a doubt my worst nightmare is having lots of bunnies in the house and no air conditioning.

I checked my land line phone and it too, was dead, no dial tone, just silence.  I thought well, due to the violent storm maybe there was a phone outage.  My cell phone still worked and I ended up calling BHRR friend and supporter Galen Boal, who runs an air conditioning repair business, and he very graciously came over at 8am and fixed my A/C and got it running.  He said he did it for the bunnies and would take no payment.  I can't express how thankful I am to Galen for his willingness to help and the donation of his time and expertise to keep the bunnies (and me) comfortable and cool.

So, with the A/C blasting lovely cool air throughout the house, I thought well, I may be out of the woods NOW.  Oh, that would hardly be the case...

I went to my desktop computer and turned it on to log in and check email, and the flat screen monitor would not turn on.  After a bit of checking I determine the power supply transformer was dead.  How odd, I thought.  So I went to my laptop but could not get to the Internet.  After a lot more checking I discovered that my wireless network and my broadband router were both fried.  Kaput.  Screwed.  I realized another of my nightmares had come true - a power surge.

When the lightning hit last night, it created a massive electromagnetic field for a split second.  Most of my electronic equipment runs on some sort of transformer, and since transformers are mostly big coils of copper wire, a current burst was induced and stuff got fried.  In fact that's what was wrong with my air conditioning, a 24-volt transformer in the main unit got toasted.  Luckily it was easily replaced, but my other equipment was out of luck.  Also luckily my HDTV, refrigerator and other big-ticket electronics were surge-protected, but I still lost a lot of electrical components, and I am still finding things that were destroyed by the surge.  Even the dimmer switch on the overhead light above my kitchen table was ruined.  A dimmer switch?  Really?

In the midst of all this I still had to pick up a bunny coming to our shelter from the Humane Society of Yuma at 11am.  A little gray Holland Lop, it had been kept in a cage with another, unneutered male rabbit who attacked and beat up the smaller rabbit without mercy.  Their idiot owner finally wised up and separated them, and dumped the smaller injured bunny off at the Humane Society, and from there to us.  Poor little guy, named Giblet, has numerous scars and bite marks all over his head and body, and some big lumpy scar tissue around his eye, but somehow, almost magically, Giblet is still very sweet, friendly and trusting.  It never fails to amaze me how resilient and accepting rabbits are to even the most horrendous, painful treatments.  His photo is below.

Later that afternoon my trusty laptop computer decided it was a good day to die, and did just that.  I got a dreaded Blue Screen of Death and then it would not boot up.  This laptop was at least 5 years old and pretty much had my life on it.  Luckily I did a major data backup last week when it was starting to act up, but I didn't expect it to die.  I think the hard drive is shot.  I definitely have gotten my money's worth from that computer, using it nearly every day for hours and hours, but still, I am going to lose so much stuff in terms of pictures and documents, it is so not fair.  It's in the repair shop right now and may there's something that can be done to save it, but I am not optimistic.  Damn.

By early evening I had just about had it.  I was running on adrenaline from no sleep the night before, and it was like being wired on speed.  I literally could not stop moving, my brain was stuck on overdrive and I had no appetite, even though I had not eaten at all that day.  I pushed myself to get the rabbits their salads and dinner, took a shower and crawled into bed, grateful that this singularly awful, horrible day was finally over.

This day really sucked but somehow, in the grand scheme of things, it could have been much worse.  All my rabbits were fine, I was okay other than being completely exhausted mentally and physically, and no one lost their life or got injured.  But still, so many bad, depressing, costly and unnecessary things happened and I lost so much from the power surge, it really is going to take time and a lot of money to get back to somewhere near where things used to be.  There's something about the beginning of July being the time that some really bad things happen to me.  Last year on July 6th was my automobile accident where my car was totaled, this year it was the Storm from Hell and the horrific aftermath.  Sometimes life really sucks, but as with everything, you find a way to get through it.

Time For A Bunny Break!

I admit I've been on a blogging rampage recently. Temperamentally unable to let stupid people skate by unchallanged, I am compelled to take to task idiots who wear their profound lack of intelligence like some bizarro-world badge of honor. My blog posts practically write themselves, what with conservative Republicans - always my target of choice - working harder than ever to serve up gigantic, humongous, festering, steaming piles of stupid, of every stripe and variety. And it never ends! Just today on the news they showed some dried-up, puckered old woman at the "Values Voters" confab who said in all seriousness that she "gets her news from the Fox News Channel because they give you both sides of the issue, and the mainstream media only gives you the liberal view." Stupidity of that magnitude is simply a force of nature, like an earthquake or an F-5 tornado. Awesome and appalling at the same time, you tremble when you see it but still can't get out of its way, like a freight train bearing down on you. Witnessing it is like falling into a toilet. Not only is the actual experience pretty awful, but afterward you feel dirty and disgusting and soiled for a really long time.

So I figured it's time to stop taking cheap shots at the terminally ignorant (for a little while), and wallow in some of the finer things of life - rabbits! There is no better remedy for the corrosive effect that mass stupidity has on your soul than to contemplate the beauty, perfection and sweetness of the rabbit. These, then, are some of the wonderful bunnies who have come into my life recently, some for a short time and others for a bit longer, and have done much to renew my faith that there are some good things in life worth appreciating.

This is Gunnar, a super-sweet little guy whom I captured as a stray in a backyard in south Phoenix. A very nice elderly couple called our Rescue and said they needed help catching a bunny who had been in their yard for the past three weeks. I went to their home with a humane trap and was explaining to them how to set it up, when they mentioned that the bunny is out in their yard right now. I went out to see and spotted this cute little guy hiding under a bush. He allowed me to come up to him and pet him, and as I did I grabbed him. He was very frightened and let out a loud scream, but he soon calmed down and relaxed in my arms. I have him home with me now in foster care and after some initial shyness, he is blossoming and becoming very friendly. He is incredibly beautiful, full of sweetness, and docile. He will make someone a fantastic companion some day.

Minnie is a very interesting and beautiful bunny. She appears to be a breed called Champagne d'Argente, a very old and popular breed in Europe but not very common in the U.S. Her fur coloring and markings are breath-taking, and people cannot stop looking at her and marveling at her. She's had a pretty tough life so far, being innocently and unfairly victimized by a hoarder who kept her and nearly 60 other bunnies in horrible conditions. But as all bunnies seem to have, she has a remarkable capacity to get past her terrible treatment and learn to love and trust again. She is a very exceptional, and exceptionally beautiful girl.

This is Talia, whom I featured in an earlier post on this blog, entitled "Talia's Dance of Joy". Talia came to us with a horrendous, awful and nearly unbelievable infection of her face, due to being bitten by another animal. Her face was so swollen and the pain she experienced must have been horrific. Now, months later, she is an extremely happy, playful and active girl. She loves nothing more than to come out of her cage for some free run time in the house. She absolutely cannot help but jump, spin and dance in the air out of sheer joy.

This is Mr. O'Reilly, a nine-and-a-half year old Holland lop who came to our shelter when his elderly owner passed away. Unneutered, he was the horniest old geezer you've ever seen. Talk about a one-track mind, even at his age. And he most definitely did NOT need any Viagra. In fact he was so unrelentingly, inappropriately horny all the time I began to call him "Senator." He is happily living in foster care with another volunteer, but he is such a memorable, lovable guy, and I hope he lives a very long time.

These are just some of the bunnies I feel so very blessed, honored and privileged to have gotten to know. Their good, pure and beautiful souls are a never-ending source of joy to me. They are truly some of the wonderful things in life that are easy to overlook, but can bring such a wealth of inspiration and love to anyone willing to open their hearts to them.

You can find out more about these lovable buns at the Brambley Hedge Rabbit Rescue website.