Updates from the Unfarm

It has been a while since I’ve checked in so another session of Unfarm Updates is in order. I (barely) survived the school year, managing to pull off A’s and B’s in a soil science class and a computer class. The computer class was especially tedious with lots of little details to memorize and four proctored tests to take. (Really, proctored exams in a 100 level online class? Please.) Needless to say, I was more than happy to cross that class off my list and I will never have to take another computer class for as long as I live. Do you hear angels singing, too, or is it just me?

 

Speaking of angels, we’ve had another loss here on the Unfarm. Poor little Suki-mama passed away about a month ago. She had been suffering from kidney disease for a while and eventually lost about half her body weight. Despite the best vet care we could provide, the disease was too severe and she passed away here at home in the morning. I had checked on her as soon as I woke up and found her sitting in her litter box, not looking great but hanging in there. I returned less than half an hour later, after eating breakfast and preparing her medicine, to find that she had passed away. So far, Jojo – who was her mate – seems to be doing tolerably and is not moping much, so I have hopes that he will not decline as time goes on and I will not be forced to lose another of my children any time soon.

 

Such is the cycle of life, I suppose. No matter how much we may want to, we can’t stop it from turning. The way I handle it, usually, is to bring a new animal to the Unfarm. And so we have found ourselves with a couple new additions: Buttercup, a Chantecler breed chick, and Belle, a Brahma. “We found ourselves with a couple new additions” may imply that they showed up on our doorstep one morning, with their small possessions wrapped up in a bandana, carried over their shoulders on tiny sticks. This is not what happened. What did occur was more along the lines of my mother lamenting the fact that our hens don’t lay eggs nearly as often now that they are more mature, which I took to mean, “perhaps we should get more chickens.” She will, of course, deny this if you ask her, so I took it upon myself to go to the local store and pick up a couple rarey breed chicks. When adding chickens to an existing flock, it is best to add two or more at a time, so that they have a companion while they are young and a partner once they join the flock, to prevent the older hens from picking on them too much. So really, it would have been irresponsible of me to only get one. Once she got over her shock, Mom quickly warmed up to the chicks and now calls them “her girls” or “the littles” (as opposed to our established flock – “the ladies”) and likes to say goodnight to them before going to sleep. So really, I did her a favor.

 

I feel that I should perhaps mention another disclaimer – despite what most of my family thinks, I am not an animal hoarder.  I do not acquire animals willy nilly, so to speak. I never have more animals than I can take care of, or more than we have room for, or more than we can afford to care for.  It is quite possible that, if asked, my parents would argue that last point – they frequently complain that we have surely funded an additional wing or two on our vet’s office by now, but when it comes down to it, we have never euthanized an animal that was not ready to go because of costs.  We pay for laser treatments for arthritis, surgery for kidney stones, specialists in cardiology and hysterectomies on hens.  It has always been my opinion that money can eventually be replaced, but we will never have another Kita, or Emmy, Dandelion the hen, or Patches the guinea pig.

Adding insult to injury

Aspen got a bath today, which would be bad enough in itself, but the bath was on top of the haircut he got this morning.  A lion cut, which means that he was completely shaved down except for his head, his lower legs, and a poof on his tail.  I can only imagine how humiliated he must feel to now more closely resemble a poodle than the distinguished Norwegian forest cat he is.  

I should perhaps mention, in case I haven’t in the past, that we do not shave him because it amuses us. (It is actually something of an ordeal as he cannot be groomed without sedation and must therefore be taken to the vet and placed under observation while he is under the anesthetic and after he comes out of it.)  We shave him once a year, near the beginning of summer, because he has spent the previous twelve months growing his coat out and nursing an impressive crop of mats and by this point he has at least a good half dozen in various places on his chest and stomach.  Brushing his fur is out of the question unless we develop the desire to experience life as an amputee as he has no qualms about biting (and scratching) the hand that feeds him.

The bath is not something we usually do, but today he messed in his carrier on the way home and by the time we got to the house he stank to high heaven, so it was either subject him to a bath or break out the gas masks and hope the scent cleared.  The bath, however, put an already cranky cat into a foul temper and he crept into a bed under one of the desks and proceeded to mope for the next five hours, looking decidedly angry and shivering even with the heater on.  And so now, to top it all off, if the weather doesn’t warm up soon, we might have to contemplate getting him a sweater of some sort.  If it comes to that, it might be wise to have the Red Cross on standby because I don’t see us getting through that without serious bodily harm.  Let’s all pray for sun.

I Claim This Land in the Name of [insert individual bunny name here]

At current count, the Unfarm has 4 rabbits. Two single males, and one bonded pair consisting of a male and a female. They are house rabbits who hang out with me in my office/studio. Can’t you just picture it: four cute, cuddly, fluffy rabbits hopping around the room together, munching on veggies and then flopping onto their sides and grooming one another?

I can’t. Oh sure, they are fluffy and cute and they do love to hop around, munching on treats and chewing whatever they can get their teeth on (furniture, power cords, books, etc), but let them all out at once and what you have, far from being a group of contented rabbits, is a rolling, kicking, biting, scratching ball of flying fur. Bunnies are vicious, territorial little animals. Bonding them takes a great deal of time and energy, if it happens at all.

And after a vet bill totaling over $1000, I am scared off of trying to bond the rabbits for the time being. I might clarify that it isn’t just about the money, it has more to do with the damage (physical and emotional) they inflict upon each other before I can break up the fighting. This means that giving the rabbits time out each day necessitates a rather elaborate set up of ramps and gates in an effort to allow the rabbit(s) access to their own cage while simultaneously blocking their access to cords and furniture they will chew on as well as the other rabbit cages, as they have a tendency to pee around them while trying to claim the entire room as their own personal territory. It doesn’t matter how many times I tell them that the room is actually my territory, not theirs – they refuse to believe me. Rabbits are surprisingly stubborn animals.

The ramp is the newest addition to the bunny room – it was required after I put two of the three cages up on tables and left only Clover’s cage on the floor. There were two reasons behind this move; first, I figured that putting the cages up on tables would allow me to position them so that they weren’t sticking out into the center of the room as much and I could store the litter boxes and large bin of hay underneath one of the tables, instead of on top of Suki and Jojo’s cage; and secondly, by raising Suki and Jojo’s cage, as well as Basil’s, up out of sight of rabbits loose on the floor, I hoped that the bunnies would feel less territorial and would therefore mark less while out gallivanting around the room. Clover’s cage was chosen to remain on the floor as he tends to be the neatest, tidiest rabbit with the best litter box manners and he rarely marks while out.

When Suki, Jojo or Basil are allowed out, I open the cage door and put in the ramp (hinged to allow them safe and easy access to the ramp from inside their cages, and carpeted to give them secure footing). After a few minutes spent getting accustomed to it, they now happily hop up and down the ramp and have constant access to their litter boxes while enjoying their time out.

Not that it has helped – the rabbits continue in their efforts to claim the entire room for themselves. any areas not blocked off or protected by plastic hall runner. It seems my only option is to keep a floor cleaner close at hand or squirt the rabbits with water if I happen to catch them in the act.

Not that it has helped – the rabbits are of the opinion that I clearly do not understand whose territory is whose. In an effort to clarify things, Basil tells me that the whole room is his. Suki and Jojo, on the other hand, insist that they own the whole room. Clover doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about – he would rather leave the arguing to the other three bunnies while he focuses on the important things in life: chewing through all of the most expensive electrical cords and art supplies that I have been careless enough to leave unguarded. And by unguarded, I mean those objects that are blocked only by very heavy pieces of furniture and numerous gates. As anyone who lives with rabbits knows, if I really wanted to keep something safe, I would surround it with a five foot high gate of metal mesh, attached to the wall on both ends by no less than 5 bolts and topped with barbed wire.