Bob Tarte Read online

  Buying Binky was one of the most pivotal, far-reaching actions of my adult years, and it’s inexcusable that I can’t retrace the tortured chain of reasoning that convinced me that having a rabbit was a good idea. Binky was more than just a bunny. He transformed our house from a pristine, animal-free environment into an indoor petting zoo. He changed my life forever. When I ponder my pet-free past, I ask myself not only why I ever agreed to buy him, but also how a sour dwarf Dutch rabbit with few social skills ended up embodying an argument for more animals rather than none.

  It was during our first spring together in the house that Linda lobbied me for a bunny. “Wouldn’t it be fun to have a little animal hopping around the house?” she asked.

  “You sort of hop when you walk,” I told her. “If you worked on it a bit, we wouldn’t need a rabbit.”

  “You couldn’t find an animal that’s less trouble,” she insisted. “My friend Justina has a bunny, and it just hangs out near the clothes dryer and uses an old towel for a bed.”

  “Then where will you sleep?” I asked her. But I had learned that it was useless arguing with anyone as strong-minded as Linda.

  Before I met Linda, she had owned a couple of dogs and now missed having them. A rabbit seemed like an easier alternative. I knew that a dog had to be walked, bathed, brushed, housebroken, lugged around in the car, trained to bark rarely, taught not to knock down the elderly, flea-powdered, dewormed, pooper-scooped, spayed or fixed, deflected from visitors’ crotches, kept away from fellow dogs, protected from roaming skunks, talked to through a vacuum cleaner hose, fed, licensed, vaccinated, and generally made a part of the family pack. The world of a panting, ever-hungry, free-range hound was also my world, while the world of a small caged animal was merely a three-foot cube. So went my thinking at the time.

  A visit to my friend Philip’s seemed to confirm the trouble-free nature of owning a rabbit. As we sat in his living room, I asked him if he might let his bunny, Drusilla, out of her cage.

  “Oh, she’s already in here somewhere, probably hiding behind a chair,” he said.

  As I stood up, I caught the barest glimpse of fur backing into the shadows. Compared to the lap-bounding behavior of a cat or the pet-me persistence of a dog, Drusilla’s reticence appealed to me. “Is this all she ever does?”

  “She basically has two modes. When she first comes into a room, she’ll run all over the place as fast as she can. After that, she just stays in one spot unless you can convince her there’s a reason to come out.” This sounded ideal. I dismissed as sheer whimsy the caution that came next. “She does have an attraction to electrical cords. I usually unplug anything I’m not using and put the cords out of her reach before I let her into a room. Otherwise, she goes right for the cord and bites it cleanly in two.”

  “And she doesn’t get a shock?”

  “Rabbits’ mouths are very dry,” Philip surmised. “They don’t have much saliva, so she doesn’t get the same jolt you would get if you tried biting through a lamp cord.”

  The notion of my acquiring a taste for plastic-coated copper wire was so preposterous, I filed the matter away with Philip’s other peculiarities—such as keeping a two-year-old Thanksgiving turkey carcass in his refrigerator’s vegetable crisper. Some mysterious agent was undoubtedly putting the guillotine to Philip’s appliance cords and pointing the finger at his bunny.

  I told Linda about Drusilla’s alleged taste for electrical cords.

  “My customer Rose has a bunny, and she doesn’t have that problem,” she said.

  “I thought Justina had the rabbit.”

  “Rose has one, too,” said Linda, who ran into all sorts of colorful people in her job as a housecleaner. “He sits on Rose’s lap while she watches Wheel of Fortune.”

  “That’s my favorite show!”

  “I know.”

  “And the bunny would sit on my lap?”

  All at once, the road to bunny ownership seemed as smooth and straight as a good intentions–paved superhighway. But in an attack of poor judgment, we ended up choosing a rabbit that showed signs of being exactly the opposite of what we wanted. To start with, it had never dawned on us to do anything as sensible as research before making our selection. Our assumption was that except for variances in size, a bunny was a bunny. Who would have suspected that different breeds might possess different personalities?

  Apparently not the farmer just north of the village of Rockford, who had posted a hand-lettered sign in front of his trailer succinctly advertising RABBITS. To Linda’s horror, the farmer raised “meat pen” animals, bred especially for the dinner table. Chastened, she tried another farm down the road that sported similar advertising. This time the rabbits were for sale as pets, but all of them were the French lop variety, a breed whose floor-dragging, excessively floppy ears make it resemble a stuffed-animal designer’s notion of a cocker spaniel puppy. Linda favored what she termed a “Cadbury bunny,” an alert, upright-ear rabbit. The lop-ear breeder, a man with normal ears of his own, suggested that we attend the annual Easter Bunny Show at North Kent Mall the following weekend.

  In my graduate-school days I had visited a San Francisco cat show so chockablock with attractive and distinctive breeds of felines, I left vowing never again to use the vulgar term “kitty.” And Linda had encouraged my attendance at craft fairs and antique shows brimming with countless numbers of undifferentiated items and varied things. I imagined that the North Kent Mall Easter Bunny Show would be a combination of these.

  Instead, the event was a celebration of vacant real estate. Staggered within a vast aisle of acreage that yawned past joyless, deserted shoe stores were exactly three Bunny Show conglomerations of less than six cages each. The first aggregate held a few miniature breeds like the Netherlands dwarf. It reminded me of a guinea pig with Popsicle-stick ears. Never mind that we would later learn that the breed was considered to be remarkably affectionate. The next batch of cages contained the dreaded French lop, renowned for its gentleness and pleasant nature. We passed it by. On the last cluster of tables were several California-breed “meat pen” bunnies a little too large and salty for our tastes, plus dwarf Dutch bunnies. A judge at the Kent County 4-H Youth Fair in Lowell would later charitably describe the dwarf Dutch breed as “moody.” We zeroed in on one of these.

  A small bristle-haired boy was petting a midsize, amiable rabbit who was stretched placidly on the tabletop exhibiting no urge to squirm or bolt. Like a cat taking an extended nap, it basked in human companionship. We could not resist stroking the rabbit’s back while chuckling at its coloring, which comically suggested black britches and a black head cowl with milk-white fur in between.

  “Is this one for sale?” Linda asked excitedly.

  “She’s the mother,” the boy told us without looking up.

  “But is she for sale?” I asked. “How old is she?”

  “Thirteen months.”

  Linda and I took a hasty conference. An age of a year and a month seemed elderly by rabbit standards, especially when we’d had our minds set on a blank-slate baby bunny that we could lovingly raise and mold to our wills. A breeder had told us that males make better pets than females, presumably, I realize in retrospect, because their habits of mounting anything that moved and spraying the furniture in tomcat fashion appealed to his darker side. Still, the mother bunny did have the quiet temperament we were looking for. We visibly leaned in her direction.

  “These are from her litter,” the boy told us, indicating a trio of eight-week-old dwarf Dutches in an adjacent cage. If the mother was friendly and people-loving, surely her offspring would follow suit, we reasoned, forgetting the lesson of Cain.

  “That one sure is cute,” Linda said.

  “Has he seen Wheel of Fortune?” I asked.

  “You like him?” beamed a round-shouldered man wearing a plaid shirt and a nametag that identified him as Warren. “I favor the Dutches, too,” he admitted, and indeed there was a resemblance around the teeth and jowls.

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sp; “Can we hold him?” Linda asked.

  “Sure,” Warren assured us with a doubtful air. No sooner had he unlatched the wire door and slid his hand into the cage than did the docile bunny absently nibbling on the steel spout of his water bottle turn into a churning, clawing, parcel of disdain for human contact. Despite his diminutive size, he packed a wallop via muscular back legs whose sole purpose, honed by eons of evolutionary development, was to propel him forward by kicks. With the practiced dexterity of a juggler, Warren tipped the writhing bundle into Linda’s arms, but she could not hold him. Neither could I.

  “Are there any other boys?” Linda asked as Warren returned the rabbit to his cage. As soon as his feet touched the cedar-chip bedding, he reverted to a picture of innocence.

  Warren shook his head. “All the rest are females.”

  We weighed our options. The pair of breeders Linda had visited near Rockford didn’t have what we wanted, and the notion of seeking out other breeders, visiting the numerous pet shops in our area, or waiting even another instant never entered our minds.

  “It may be that he just doesn’t know you yet,” Warren offered.

  “We’ll take him!” we essentially shouted.

  That man knew how to close a sale. Since we lacked the prowess and body armor to carry our purchase from mall to parking lot, Warren packed our bunny in a sturdy cardboard box. All the way back to Lowell, he scratched and bit the carton in a preview of the carpet-pulling, shoe-destroying, antisocial behavior to come. Within an hour of installing him in our home, Linda had managed to convey our new pet to the couch using an embrace resembling a wrestling hold that restricted his struggles to angry wiggles.

  “He just needs to get used to being held,” Linda suggested, interpreting my vigorous head-shaking as permission to drop him in my lap.

  “Let’s give him a few days,” I suggested as I fought to restrain his clawing feet.

  “See. He’s settling down.”

  “He hasn’t any choice. If I loosen my grip, I’ll probably lose a hand.” But after a few seconds, tremors ceased to rock his body and he started to relax. “Well, maybe you’re right,” I told Linda, precisely as the rabbit cemented the relationship between us by peeing enthusiastically all over my pantleg and the front of the couch.

  In the days ahead, I made a game effort at bonding with Binky, whom we named after the sullen rabbit in Matt Groening’s comic strip Life in Hell. Mimicking photos of Dian Fossey communing with mountain gorillas, I sprawled across the kitchen linoleum in an unthreatening, welcoming posture as Binky hopped around me obliviously. But I was merely a navigation obstacle. I even brought a pillow into the room, dowsed the lights, and feigned a nap to put him at ease with my presence. Ease wasn’t the problem, however, as Binky proved whenever we offered him a banana. He’d be at our side in a flash, front paws resting on our wrist for extra eating leverage. His notion of affection was deigning to share a room with his back to us. When feeling especially generous, he’d allow us to squat behind him and give his head and ears a few brisk strokes. If further intimacy was pressed on him, he’d shake our hands away, hop to a human-free zone across the room, and lick himself where we had touched him.

  We wheedled Binky with a fancy water bottle, litter box, and chew toys, fed him tortilla chips and buttered toast, built him an outdoor exercise pen, and allowed him unrestricted run of the house, yet he still displayed what we would come to know as typical rabbit belligerence. We bought him a lavender-colored leash and matching Chihuahua-scaled harness, which he hated, and took him out in our woods for ill-conceived walks that alternated between Binky welding himself to one spot and bolting ahead so quickly, we couldn’t keep up. Judging by his attitude, we still didn’t spoil him enough. My friend Philip would lavish M&M candies on his bunny, Drusilla. The books on rabbits we’d bought warned us that chocolate was poisonous to them. Drusilla obviously hadn’t bothered to read the literature. Whenever Philip wanted to summon her, he’d shake a bag of M&Ms, and she would come running from whatever corner of his apartment she was holed up in. The only thing that rousted Binky from a hiding place was the descent of a human hand threatening to pet him or pick him up.

  Binky’s breeder, Warren, had handed Linda his business card at the time he had sold Binky to us, inviting her to call him with any problems. It was reassuring that we had an expert on tap, and many were the times that Linda took him up on his offer.

  “We’re having trouble with Binky not wanting us to pet him,” Linda said to Warren on one occasion.

  “That’s odd,” Warren replied. “I’ve never run into that one before. I just don’t know what to tell you.”

  Another time Linda called him about Binky’s habit of gnawing on everything in our house. “I wish I had an answer for you,” Warren told Linda, encouraging her to phone again if we had any other concerns. We received an identical answer about Binky’s penchant for running in circles around our feet while making a buzzing sound. “Boy, that’s really a new one on me,” he admitted. We wondered how a person who made a profession of breeding rabbits could know so little about their behavior.

  Having never owned a rabbit before, I didn’t know how to interact with Binky. I’d expected him to behave not too differently from a cat, to be more curious and attentive to his owners and perhaps less fastidiously self-involved. Dogs are easy to deal with because they are so much like us. With a single word or the arch of an eyebrow, you could shame a dog into curling up in the corner instead of bothering you. Cats aren’t as easily dissuaded, but you can at least be sure that they’re reacting to the sound of your voice. Under the right circumstances, a string of words will evoke paroxysms of pleasure in a cat, far greater than what could be achieved with the finest canned dinner product. I’d read that bunnies also enjoy being talked to, but Binky gave no outward sign that this was true.

  His muteness struck me as eerie. A happy cat will purr. An unhappy dog will whine. Parrots are vocal tracts on legs. But rabbits come into this world and leave it as sonic blank slates, occasionally grunting when they’re picked up in a manner offensive to them and, as we later learned, emitting a low buzz when they’re sexually stimulated or in an aggressive mode. Making eye contact with Binky was only slightly more rewarding than staring into the shallows of an opaque pond. I knew someone was there, some being with a strong personality, but no spark of recognition leaped between us.

  Though Binky challenged my communication skills, he was adept at conveying his own desires. Banging his empty water dish against the bars of his cage, he expressed his dissatisfaction with being locked up as unmistakably as Jimmy Cagney in White Heat. He was addicted to schedules and loathed changes in his environment. The addition of a Christmas tree in our living room met with his approval, because its boughs gave him a new place of concealment. But when Easter rolled around, and we finally removed the tree, he expressed his outrage by thumping the floor with a hind foot whenever he came into the room and snubbing us for more than a month. On another occasion we had the audacity to shift the position of the couch to accommodate a new floor lamp. Minutes after his evening parole from his cage, Binky snuffled at the new lamp, raised himself on his hind legs, and with a shove of his front paws toppled the interloper.

  Binky’s narcissism was greater than any cat’s. The majority of his nonnapping hours were spent fastidiously grooming himself. Other than that, his favorite out-of-cage pastime was giving electrical wires the licorice-whip treatment and hiding in impossible-to-reach places. He was happiest when combining the two. The AC adapter cable to my pricey Sony shortwave portable ran through a narrow channel between the wall and our platform bed, where I figured it was safe. Elongating his pear-shaped bulk to the requisite two-inch width, he wriggled snakewise down the passageway and clipped the wire into pieces. To curb his appetite for the cables I loved most, I cut a three-foot length from an old extension cord and presented it to him. With all the disdain a rabbit could muster, he plucked it from my hand and with a toss of his head flun
g it from his sight. Like sharks attracted to transatlantic phone cables on the ocean floor, Binky apparently craved live voltage. He never injured himself pursuing his habit, but our appliances sported numerous bandages.

  Binky gave us our first jolt of pet destructiveness. Though his widely scattered poop pellets were inoffensive as such materials go, they presented us with an ongoing maintenance problem. Rabbits, we’d been told, were easy to litter train. And it’s true. They gravitate naturally toward a litter box, mysteriously divining its purpose the first time they hop inside. Just as instinctively, they are also keenly set on establishing a presence throughout their territory. Chin-rubbing is one method. Glands on the front of their heads deposit their scent on whatever coffee table, coat stand, chair leg, or human foot they rub against. But when a rabbit, especially a male, is serious about letting others know which lands he claims as his own, bodily functions are most effective. We learned this with Binky, and the lesson was magnified with a later rabbit population in which three males vied to plant their flag in shared territory.

  More worrisome, we found, was the front end of a rabbit. Rabbits’ teeth grow continuously. Unchecked, the lower incisors rise up in werewolf fashion, while the upper teeth can curve inward until they eventually penetrate the roof of the mouth. Usually, the act of eating grinds down the teeth, and excess length is kept in check by a rabbit’s love of chewing any object within reach. To that end, Binky gnawed at our woodwork. He pulled out our living room carpet fibers. He made hors d’oeuvres out of the dust jackets to Flying Saucers from Mars, Flying Saucers and the Three Men, and They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers, three classics of modern science I kept on the bottom shelf of an upstairs bookcase. He decimated shoes, speaker cables, antenna feeds, chair legs, phone lines, computer interconnects, area rugs, record-album jackets, litter boxes, wicker baskets, magazines, and the ribbon cable from our satellite dish.