About a week after the births, I was feeding MuTu and noticed this one little scrawny rabbit that hadn't yet grown fur rolling out of the hutch and then clawing its way about blindly and pathetically, eyes closed. Normally baby rabbits will stay inside the warren or hutch for the first two weeks, subsisting only on their mother's milk. This one appeared to be hungry, but MuTu didn't seem interested in feeding it. I opened the top of the rabbit hutch and looked at the other little rabbits. Some of them were moving around inside, and had grown fur. There was one limp little body in the corner, probably pushed or rolled there, with ants beginning to crawl over it; sadly, even though I took it out immediately, I could tell it had stopped breathing. I buried the dead baby, and there were 9 remaining alive, including the scrawny malnourished bunny that had rolled out of the hutch.
We didn't want the scrawny one to die, so we fed it soymilk with a syringe. It resisted at first, and then it finally became tired and let the soymilk slide down its throat. We returned it back to the hutch with the other eight, hoping that we gave it a fighting chance at life.
A week after that, we had MuTu and her bunnies relocated to a cage that we moved from time to time on the grass so the babies would have fresh grass besides their mother's milk. The littlest rabbit was slower than the others and couldn't get milk. Its eyes were closed from infections, and the other bunnies pushed it around in their struggle to be fed. One of the other eight bunnies also couldn't get at the mother's milk, because it had its leg injured somehow and was limping around. My parents temporarily nicknamed them GuaiTui ("cripple") and XiaYanJing ("blind"), and took them in a newspaper lined box inside our house. The two of them were too weak to nibble on carrots or cookies without taking long breaks and rests (yes, rabbits will eat crackers and fortune cookies). We chopped broccoli crowns for them, and made carrot shavings with the vegetable peeler, so they wouldn't have to expend much energy getting the food down. For a few days afterwards we would feed them soymilk with a syringe until they didn't want it anymore, and we treated the blind rabbit's eyes with our own medical supplies, antibiotic creams and eye drops. Then we returned them to the cage on the grass lawn while their brothers and sisters frolicked and played freely in our backyard. Those two had become the smallest in size, the runts, and while we let the healthier and more energetic bunny siblings roam freely on the lawn, we were afraid that the foxes that roam around the golf course would catch and eat them. (We had previously seen and shot two opossums and a fox in our very own backyard, and had seen another fox viciously pawing around, too.)
Anyway, in May the crippled rabbit recovered and its leg healed so well the only way to distinguish it from the others was that it was a little smaller in size. It also got along fabulously well with the little blind rabbit, who remained very thin. The smallest rabbit opened its eyes, and after we washed away the infection it appeared that its right eye was clouded over and it had trouble with closing its left eyelid, so its left eye had another bout of infections that oozed pus. I named it RuRu then, because it was so pathetically weak that it would be a runt among runts. At a month old, RuRu was so small any of us could hold it in one hand.
RuRu required the most care of all the rabbits. We were concerned about its nutrition and how its immune system was doing, often feeding it by hand rather than just leave the food outside (other rabbits would get to it before little Ruru could). RuRu was very docile, and I recall one lazy spring afternoon when, tired from the exertion from eating the carrot I was feeding it, RuRu slept in my lap, and I took a nap along with RuRu in a reclining chair. RuRu was the only rabbit who would stay in my lap if I left it there, without jerking and turning around, contemplating escape. I think it's because RuRu took comfort in our presence and care.
Anyway, for the whole of June I was away and figured that RuRu would probably have forgotten me by the time that I came back. I couldn't even recognize RuRu at first, because RuRu's eyes had healed. Since May there's been three more new litters of bunnies. I only guessed that RuRu is RuRu because I found a rabbit standing on its hind legs trying to crawl up into my lap, and well, because of the terrible heat outside I took RuRu indoors to get a better look at her. Yes, I think that she is female because she's finally becoming rounder and flatter in the rump, while males maintain narrow and straight hips.
Now the telltale sign that it's RuRu is her left ear, which flops down probably due to malnourishment and poor development of the muscle(s). She likes to romp around, so she sometimes still has little pieces of dirt in her fur. Nowadays she no longer fits in the palm of one hand, and it takes two hands to carry her around safely, though of course she's still small for rabbits of 2+ months.
No comments:
Post a Comment