Harley

Our bunny Harley was sadly put to sleep (don’t like that expression any more than I like ‘passed away’, but ‘euthanised’ seems a bit brutal) on Monday 1 June, after suffering with an abscess on the side of his head for a number of months. Ruth had been warned that the abscess wasn’t treatable but had agreed with the vet to monitor him for the time being, as his behaviour still seemed reasonably normal (though rabbits’ comfort levels are notoriously hard to assess as they do that concealing pain thing that prey species do). I’ve already done a bit of a eulogy to Harley on Facebook as per below, so have limited myself here to looking over past blog entries that mention him.

We adopted Harley from Reading Rabbit Rescue in June 2009, along with his first companion, the late (and fluffy, solid and somewhat intransigent) Lola. During his first couple of months with us, he mastered climbing the staircase, and also escaped from our garden into next door:

I continue to be surprised by Harley the Bunny’s spiritedness and agility, especially in comparison with Ruth’s previous rabbit Jake, a more nervous creature who disliked the outdoors and never to my knowledge even attempted climbing stairs. Harley has now completely mastered the staircase, which is steep even by Victorian terrace standards and is treated with some respect by visitors to the house. He also eagerly escapes into the garden at every opportunity and we are discovering by trial and error which part of the perimeter isn’t actually rabbit-proof. On Saturday he disappeared into a clump of bamboo and vanished from sight – Ruth’s calling of him resulted in the reply of “Are you looking for a rabbit?” from over the fence; she looked up to discover our neighbour Terry standing on his lawn looking down at a tiny adventurous rabbit. She went next door to fetch him and carried him back with some stern words, but he appeared not noticeably chastened.

Lola and Harley

We were warned when adopting Harley that he had long teeth that could prove to be a problem, and indeed he ended up having two or three teeth raspings under general anaesthetic during the time we owned him, including this one in September 2011:

Harley duly had his surgery last Friday, and by the time I arrived home in the evening seemed pretty much back to usual, though he didn't eat properly until Saturday afternoon, meaning that Ruth had to feed him through a pipette with some vile-looking food supplement supplied by the vet. We are hoping that his newly-shortened teeth will now enable him to eat lots of hay, as proper bunnies are supposed to.

He recovered fine from all the anaesthetics, but our hope that he might start helping himself by eating more hay to help wear his teeth down proved misplaced - despite all Ruth’s attempts Harley was never keen on hay, though most of our female rabbits have been happy enough to eat it. I'd noted Harley's disdain for hay a couple of years earlier, while also noting that he'd nibbled the spines of several of my books:

Rabbits apparently do need to chew constantly in order to keep their teeth worn down, so chewing is to be applauded, but they are provided with a plentiful supply of hay for this purpose. Lola enjoys hay but Harley appears to spurn it in favour of, this week at least, 'Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway' and 'The International Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs'.

Eating the wallpaper, with Lola

The chimney incident referred to in the eulogy happened in early January 2012, during the time that the third bedroom at the house was languishing in a shell-like state.

Since Ruth took the door to bedroom 3 off its hinges to strip the paint, we have had an awkward situation whereby we have had to put a board over the door to the room to stop Harley going in, given that since the removal of one of the chimney breasts the shaft that ran down to the dining room fireplace has been exposed. Too small to be a danger to us and it’s in the corner of the room anyway, but given Harley’s seemingly intense curiosity, we had been a bit worried that he could fall down it. On Monday evening, while I was sitting relaxing over a herbal tea and an episode of ‘Sherlock’, he duly did – urgent call from Ruth of “We have a problem” followed by inspection with a torch from above (apparently fine if slightly grey-looking bunny looking up at us) followed by Ruth having to dig a wad of stuff out of the dining room chimney to release him. On release, he wriggled out of Ruth’s arms and scampered straight back upstairs, where I pursued him shouting something along the lines of “Have You Learned Nothing!” Board over door now wedged tight with a chair – evidently a fatal gap must have been left.

The chimney rescue

Bedroom 3 proved the scene of another incident a few months later when he nearly strangled himself with a loose curtain thread:

Saturday started well when we became vaguely aware, while still in bed, of Harley making noise at the entrance to bedroom 3, as he has been on an intense quest to gain access to the room ever since his way was barred, including, evidently, shredding the bottom of the curtain that's currently hanging in the doorway. Something prompted me to get up and see what he was doing, and after a moment or so I registered that he had a cord from the curtain tightly around his neck. After yelling to Ruth to fetch a pair of scissors, I released him. Her immediate response was "Oh Harley, are you all right?", whereas I think mine was along the lines of "YOU STUPID STUPID RABBIT". That's the second time he's cheated death. Given that rabbits are renowned for dying all over the place at the slightest provocation, he can't have many lives left.

After Lola’s death in August 2013, we took Harley back to Reading Rabbit Rescue for ‘bonding’ with a second female companion. The decision-making process went thus:

We were shown three female rabbits who were currently without companions – two, Patches and Lexie, whom Sandra had identified in advance as potentially suitable, and a third, Cherry, whom she included mainly because she’s been at the rescue centre for over two years. Ruth settled on Lexie, a largish and seemingly quite boisterous bunny, as her potential mate of preference, deciding (unfairly, I thought) that Cherry was too timid. Patches dented her chances by biting Ruth during the inspection.

Despite RRR's coy references to 'husbuns' and bunny moon suites, Ruth and I had our doubts about Lexie from the start:

At the moment I have my reservations – a few days in to the new couple’s bonding, Steve and Sandra discovered that she had given Harley a bite for which he has had to go on a course of antibiotics. When I spoke to Ruth on the phone at the weekend, the two of them were apparently about as far away from each other as they could get. Time will tell if things improve.

Things didn't improve:

When we collected [Lexie] and Harley from RRR last Sunday after spending the weekend at my parents’, we regaled Sandra in a light-hearted yet mildly barbed fashion with Lexie’s faults, at which she tittered sympathetically before adding chirpily “Sold as seen!”. As we arrived, Sandra's opening sally had been to claim that Harley and Lexie seemed to get on together better than he had with Lola, at which point Lexie aggressively mounted Harley, staying on board as he raced around the enclosure trying to shake her off, and thrusting in a less than ladylike fashion. When Sandra eventually managed to coax/prise her off, poor little Harley had a large sucked patch of wet fur on the back of his neck. As we were leaving, Sandra somewhat shamefacedly thanked us for adopting her.

We did subsequently decide Lexie was not the bunny for us (or Harley) and returned her to RRR in May 2014 for re-homing. We subsequently adopted the lively and destructive Willow. In terms of being a companion for Harley, she wasn’t that much better than Lexie, albeit a little less violent; unlike Lexie, however, she charmed Ruth and me with her friendliness, and we kept her until she unfortunately became ill and died about a year later. During Willow’s time with us, Harley spent a noticeable amount of time upstairs under the bed in the master bedroom, rediscovering the ground floor after her death:

Since Willow’s death, Harley has been re-exploring the ground floor, having been more or less banished upstairs by Willow during her residence. Ruth swears she spotted a binky in the living room during his first weekend without her. Willow was given to chasing Harley out of the living room if he dared to enter, sometimes tearing out a lump of his fur for good measure.

Willow and Harley

Following Willow’s death in 2015, Harley spent about a year as a solo house rabbit, though Ruth was nudged periodically by Sandra at RRR regarding getting him another companion, as per this conversation in early 2016 where she tried to suggest to us that Harley’s troubles with females might have been due to his being a bit of a sex pest:

Sandra again raised the question of whether we were intending to get another companion for him, and we raised concerns that she’d have to be a female who wouldn’t bully him and banish him from the ground floor as per Willow. Sandra then, quite kindly, voiced her opinion that Harley is “a little bit of a sex pest”, and that some of his rougher treatment by females might essentially have been asked for. We felt similarly to how parents must feel who have been claiming to the headteacher that their child is being put upon by other children, only to be told their child is in fact a bit of a sod.

Later that year we adopted another RRR rescue bunny, Beau as Harley's fourth companion. Beau proved a good companion for him but sadly died after only a few months with us. About six months after Beau’s death we adopted a young female as Harley's fifth companion, supposed to be named Pippa but we immediately nicknamed her 'Catherine Howard', which has stuck.

Beau with Harley

In 2018 Harley went on to a daily painkiller after the vet thought his hips seemed a bit stiff. He loved this concoction, which he stayed on up until his death.

Whatever the mixture is, he seems to like it and hops up to Ruth eagerly to take it. From our observations it seems to be doing him some good; he has seemed livelier, even to the extent of chasing the much younger Catherine Howard around the room friskily each morning.

Although we don’t know Harls’ exact age, he was believed to be around a year old when we adopted him in 2009, so should be about 10 this year, which is a respectable age for a rabbit though no doubt living in a centrally-heated house has helped him.

I'm sure it did help him - indeed he always had some respiratory problems, sneezing a lot, and Sandra at RRR reckoned that his longevity was most certainly due to being a house bunny.

Harley rootling in the garden

Harley is now buried in the garden, along with Jake, Lola, Willow and Beau. It's becoming a rabbit burial ground.