Homage to our animals

A friend had a family dog recently put down, as the dog was getting fairly old and was at risk of a heart attack.

That made me think of last year, when my own family rabbit died, and then a month later my grandma died. (Might sound callous to put the two together, but they are all family to me).

As soon as my mom called that night and said I have some bad news I knew right away, something was wrong with Norm (bunny). He had gotten attacked by a hungry hawk and killed in our backyard. It had been a long and hard winter for many animals, and the hawk saw a large, fluffy meal hopping in the backyard when normally he wouldn't have bothered, for Norm was a very large rabbit with tons and tons of white fur.

You just know when something like that happens. Norm was a cute bugger, more of my mom's rabbit than the family's. He was a white fluffy prince, a Kashmir bunny who had to get shaved one time when the knots grew too large to comb out. He had a strong upper body and used it to heave himself over the small garden fence to feast on growing beans, peas and lettuce. He often panicked when in enclosed spaces like the garden and forgot how he ended up there in the first place. He wheezed with incipient asthma, and his red albino eyes bulged alarmingly when you held him for too long. Fur would fly whenever Norm was in the area, he shed incredible amounts everywhere.

We got him when our riding instructor's sister didn't want him anymore, so she offered him to us. That was fine with us, my mom coveted him and carried him around when she attended our riding lessons so it seemed only natural that one riding lesson Norm would come home with us.

He flounced about the backyard all day and got angry if it was late in the morning that he was let outside. He died where he belonged, it was the law of the wild.

I sometimes feel that Norm's death was more fair than my grandma's, even though she lived for much, much longer than him.