Buddy was my first real bunny. When I say "my first real bunny" I mean that he was the first bunny that I had owned when I was old enough to totally take care of him and make the decisions about his care myself. By the end of my freshman year in college at the University of North Carolina at Asheville I had decided that one year in the dorms was enough. I could stand to be in a place where you could only have fish as pets for only so long. How are you going to play with a fish? Stir him around in his bowl with a spoon? Yes, it was high time to live off campus where I could have a little furry critter to keep me company.
My first obstacle came when I had to decide what kind of furry pet to get. I have always been a cat person, but unfortunately my boyfriend is allergic to cats, so that was not an option. I considered having a dog for a while, but they can smell bad even when they are clean and they often require so much attention that I was assured by my friends that I was not in the position to care for a dog. So what else?
I had many discussions about this with my mother and eventually she suggested a rabbit. A rabbit? You mean a lethargic thing that I have to keep in a cage outside all the time? What fun are they? I put it out of my mind but the thought kept coming back to me. Eventually I started looking into it online and I came across the website for The House Rabbit Society. I could hardly believe what I saw! There were articles about how playful and curious rabbits are, how affectionate they can be, and about how to litter-train them! At that moment I was hooked.
After much research I decided that I really wanted to get a Netherland Dwarf as a pet. They all looked so cute in the pictures online with their tiny little ears and their big, sparkley eyes. I decided that it didn't matter what color the bunny was as long as it was a sweet little beast it was perfect.
When I went into the pet store (two weeks before school was over...shhh!) I went to the counter and told the man what I had decided: I didn't care what it looked like, I wanted the sweetest little bunny they had. He showed me the bunnies and I instantly fell in love! They looked like they had all been cut from the exact same mold and painted differently. There were three black ones, one albino one, and then there was Buddy, the grey-and-white spotted one. I had to have him! I said, "I want THAT one!" and the poor petshop employee spent the next five minutes trying to catch "that one". Apparently, not only was he the cutest, he was also the fastest and the least willing to be caught. The whole time he was trying to catch "that one", the poor employee was trying to get me to buy the albino instead, he said it was the bravest and they sweetest. Now entirely going back on what I had originally said, I insisted that I wanted the most elusive one in the cage.
The first thing Buddy did when I held him for the first time was nip me firmly on the finger, thereby setting the stage of the relationship to follow...
As proof, I have pictured one of his most important and elusive cantacts, Agent Mouseken. This is one of the few known photographs of this agent in extstance. We know that he is Jewish and that he represents the country of Russia, though if this is the country of his birth we can not say for sure. If my fears are correct, Buddy and Agent M are trading information about foreign vegetable import and may be directly responsible for the theft of some very valuable tubers and leafy vegetables stolen from the local grocery. These include more than three priceless carrots, a head of cabbage, and hundreds of baby spinach. in addition, inteligence believes that agent M may be acquiring information about nuclear bunny cages. Please, if you have any information, please sign my guest book and let the public know!
