There's Something Under The Bed...

Actually this is true more often than you’d expect in our house. Fortunately when we hear an odd scratching sound, an eerie tapping or an ominous gnawing we know what’s happening: Houdini and Sweetpea are under the bed again. This is one of their favourite places, mainly because that’s the only place in the house that we don’t want them to be. Strangely enough this is not unusual with rabbits in my experience: the more desperately you don’t want them in a particular space, the more diligently they will work on getting in there.

It’s also true that the tastiness of a plant increases in direct proportion to how much money you paid for it. So pansies which you paid five dollars a dozen completely unappetising, while an exotic shrub costing fifty dollars which you planted with love and lavished with attention in the garden…that sucker is going to be eaten within hours. Or maybe just a bit of the stem. The bit just above ground level.

Bunnies are great pets but like all of us, they have their quirks. The reason we don’t like them in our bedroom is not that they scare the living crap out of me when I’m working intently and a furry ball suddenly headbutts me in the ankle, or because they make me jump when they sneeze under the desk. It’s because this is the only room with electrical cables at ground level. Namely my computer; aka my link to the universe, email, friends, and on-line shopping. And don’t think I’m worried about the bunnies getting electrocuted, because just like the Rabbit Law Of Determining Plant Value, there is another rule called the Rabbit Law of Safe Cable Destruction. This law states – and it’s been proven by several of my rabbits over the years – that it is possible for a bunny to safely chew its way through any electrical cable without getting electrocuted. Every time. In fact those brave guys who fix high voltage power lines could do away with their fancy safety gear and go to work on live wires with nothing but a rabbit attached to each hand and never worry about getting a shock.
We’ve now brought the baby gate out of storage and have fitted it across the doorway to keep the buns on the right side of the law, so to speak.


Our wonderful uber-bun Flopsy, bless his cotton tail, chewed through at least ten telephone cables, two sets of speaker cables, and three of the computer cables in his life time. He also devoured the entire rubber edging around the balcony door, most of the living room carpet and a piece of a chair. It didn’t even make him burp.


On the bright side I am now a dab-hand at rewiring phones but I’m glad that here in Singapore there are no cables at ground level, except for my lap top in the bedroom. Now officially the most bunnylicious room in the house.
Obviously.