RIP Chloe

Chloe was put to sleep late on Sunday night, after a short illness.

We adopted Chloe from the Oxfordshire Animal Sanctuary in 2022, with the intention of her being a companion rabbit to our rabbit Cassius (formerly Aragorn). Cassius had also come to us from the OAS in 2020 as part of a bonded trio with two female rabbits, Taylor and Arya, both of whom he has now substantially outlived.

“Bonding” of Chloe and Cassius initially appeared to have been successful, but rather rapidly came unstuck, as related here.

I had wanted us to return Chloe to the OAS and possibly look out for another companion for Cassius, but Ruth developed a fondness for her and went off this idea. As we (I, certainly) never wanted to risk putting them back together, this obliged us to a) set up two separate sets of rabbit living quarters, and b) ensure that the two were kept apart. The first has taken up space in the house that we could ill afford; the second has caused constant low-level worry that I might leave a door open that would result in Cassius hopping into Chloe’s proximity. For the subsequent c. two and a half years since we adopted her, therefore, Chloe had occupied the cupboard in the dining room that had been the quarters of all our previous rabbits, and Cassius has occupied the second bedroom upstairs, which is the room that I generally work in. The latter is not quite as bad as it sounds, as Cassius had developed a fondness for this room before we adopted Chloe, in much the same way that Harley had a fondness for being under the bed in the master bedroom. However, it would really have been preferable to allow Cassius to keep his ground floor quarters and its access to the garden – but I did not want to look at Chloe all day and we couldn’t come up with what else to do with her.

Chloe never ventured far from her home quarters until, perversely, the last month or so of her life, when she suddenly developed a fondness for hopping out into the garden and sitting behind the hostas (and eating the sage).

Over the last two months, Chloe had only eaten patchily and had lost a large amount of weight. We took her a few times to see Sarah Moffat at Cherry Orchard Vets, who did a blood test and suggested that it could be liver failure. Despite losing even more weight, Chloe continued to seem reasonably perky, but things went downhill a lot over the last week or so, with the result that Ruth called the out of hours number on Sunday night and we ferried her over to the Vets Now Emergency Care service that operates out of Castle Vets on Tilehurst Road, where the on-duty vet recommended euthanasia. Ruth managed to find a space in the garden to bury Chloe, so she’s now interred next to the dogwood plant by the garage.

Ruth admired Chloe for her strong, wild rabbit-adjacent looks; I sort of saw what she meant, and agree re the overbreeding of domestic rabbits that can result in snub faces, but my attitude to Chloe was always tainted by her aggression towards Cassius and the general inconvenience that resulted. It might have been different if we'd had the space to create a home setup where the two could have been kept in neighbouring enclosures and let out separately, but we just didn't have the space for that.

 

Chloe, large brown rabbit, born 2015, died 2025.