Entropy Reducers Amalgamated

Our neighbor tells us the following story: they had received the bunny from yet another family in the neighborhood, who no longer wanted it. Now our neighbors decided—or rather, the Mother Of The House decreed—that they were not up to the task of bunny-maintenance ("I am the only one who cleans up! My daughter won't touch it! I'm not doing it anymore!") and were going to return the rabbit to the pet store whence it came.

Now, some more back-story. Another family on the block has a little boy (around 9, I think) who was a frequent visitor of the bunny and well-enamored of it. Said boy, hereafter referred to as “Our Hero”, pleaded with the bunny-owners to not return the bunny, and that he (little boy) would take it home.

Our Hero's mother wanted nothing to do with this (“Ugh! I grew up with parakeets, but I can't have this living in my space, so close to me.”) and so Our Hero resorts to PLAN B.

So little boy reports to bunny-owners, “I have friends down the block with a guinea pig, they’ll take care of the bunny.” (You know where this is leading. We are these friends.)

Mind you, this has occurred while we were out, and Our Hero (the little boy) had no idea when we were going to return. We are learning all of this from the bunny-owners.

“I hope it’s not a trouble to you, I had no idea that you didn’t know about this. We’ll be happy to take him back and return him to the pet store. But if you want him, you can keep him.”

Well, OK. Is he in good health? “Yes, absolutely, I just got tired of taking care of him by myself. He was purchased from a pet store [not proof against anything, our first guinea pig was from a pet store and had a massive brain tumor] and we took good care of him.”

I suppose that's good enough for me and my wife, the medical doctor, so now we are the proud new owners of a bunny. In the house he goes, and off to the local petstore for some bunny food and a new water bottle and a cheap book on “all you wanted to know about bunnies” or somesuch.

After a few hours pass, Our Hero comes knocking on our door inquiring about the bunny. I tell him the bunny is fine and why don’t we go talking to your parents? No, I’m not mad at you at all, but maybe we should talk. Like about not leaving an animal on someone’s porch without a note or anything. Or like making sure the bottle is always upright, our poor creature could have become Bunny Fricassee in the heat without any water. Our Hero’s parents were profusely apologetic, but our response is pretty much “גם זו לטובה” (“also this for the good” in Hebrew, roughly meaning “it's all for the best”) Our largest problem now is breaking the news gently to Our Hero that the bunny is not his living in our house, it is now ours, and he has some limited visitation rights. This is already coming to a head, as Our Hero came at least 3 times during the late afternoon today to pay a call on our newest family member.

You may also wonder how the bunny and the guinea pig get along. The answer is: not too well so far. We put them both on the sofa early on, and the bunny (who is not much larger than Buffy, the guinea pig), and after ignoring each other for a few minutes they started sniffing one another some, and then the bunny must have committed some grievous faux pas because Buffy nipped at him, causing him (yes, we found out the bunny is a boy, and Buffy is a girl—evidently the battle between the sexes is so deep it crosses species boundaries, or maybe I’m just being silly here.) to jump back and for all of us to intervene quickly. However, we think with extensive high-level diplomatic talks détente can be reached, if not a full opening of relations. Nonetheless, every guide we have read tells us to keep our pets in separate cages, and we feel that’s good advice and we’re going to follow it.

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Oh, you were wondering about the name? Well there's a bit of a difference in the house about this. We tried out a few names. My wife prefers “שפן” (“shafan”, the Hebrew word for rabbit) but the children prefer “ שפנפן” (“shafanfan”, a word which really means something like “bunny”, and which my youngest pronounces “fun-fun”, so there's a great double-entendre there). His original name was “Puffy”, but that clashes with Buffy, and besides, none of the kids liked it.

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All of this comes after the impromptu visit by my cousins Belinda (from NJ) and Ira (from AZ) and his 3 daughters (who by and large were unknown to my sons) yesterday, prompting my oldest son to comment that this whole weekend has been a non-stop whirlwind invasion of our house by new friends. “What a great way to finish off a weekend!”

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Oh, if you were wondering if there’s something deep and meaningful in the title, you are right. We are expecting (God willing) child #4 “any second now”. So when we called up my parents and my in-laws with the phone call “I've got great news! <pregnant pause> It's a bunny!” the collective response was to attempt to reach through the phone and smack me silly. At least our friends thought it funny. Mildly.