Meet the new Addition

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Everyone, I’d like you to meet Dollypop, the amazing magical rabbit.

 

When I first saw her face, she reminded me so much of a muppet I had to laugh.

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We picked her up a week ago.  In that time, she has managed to escape her enclosure five times.  We’ve been keeping her on our sun porch in a cage I fabricated out of a bottomless, topless bird cage and a 2 inch tall plastic tote that just happened to fit perfectly inside.

I’ll admit that the first escape was my fault.  I went to let her out to run around on the first day and opened the sliding door on the side of the cage so she could hop in and out as she pleased.  I suppose I didn’t remember that rabbits had any form of intelligence.  I figured she wouldn’t remember that her door opens, or at least assumed that she couldn’t open it on her own.  How wrong I was. I closed her back up in her cage that night, and the next morning awoke to one of the biggest messes I’ve ever seen.

You see, we’ve been growing an assortment of herbs and small plants in our sun porch.  We had spinach growing in a large window box, various herbs thriving in tall pots on the floor, and several trays of tomato seedlings sprouting.  The spinach had grown to the perfect size, and we had big plans to eat it this week.  The herbs had survived the whole winter indoors and I was going to move them outside to enjoy the sunshine.  This was the last week for these plants to remain indoors before going out into the garden.  Key word: Was.

When I opened the door to the sun porch that morning my jaw dropped. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.  The entire floor was coated in soil, the window box had fallen from the sill and every planter in reach had been kicked over with the soil scattered everywhere.  Practically every bit of greenery in reach had been devoured, and laying oh-so-innocently in the middle of all this destruction, was sweet little Dolly.  She was just looking at me like this was no big deal, just another day in the life of a rabbit.

Even though I was frustrated and devastated, I had to laugh at the absurdity of it all.  It was clear that this is no ordinary rabbit.  I’m not entirely surprised that she managed to open the door to her cage.  I’m not even surprised that she dug up and ate every bit of plant on the porch.  What does surprise me is that she managed to get the window box onto the floor from it’s spot nearly four feet up.  In order to knock down the window planter, she must have jumped at it repeatedly from the couch, trying again and again until she finally succeeded.

Her second escape was quite a mystery to me.  I had used a safety pin to ‘lock’ the door to the cage and figured that would be the end of this escape artist’s career.  Nope.  She magically got out again the next night, scattering still more soil on my freshly vacuumed floor.  She was also thoughtful enough to spread an incredible amount of poop all over the floor, so that walking across it was like trying to cross a field full of land mines.  I’ll have you know, I did not get through unscathed.  I cleaned up the mess for the second time and marveled at her ingenuity.

The next day I woke up to a third mess in the sun porch, and little miss was proudly observing her path of destruction from the top of a tall planter.  I assumed that she had been escaping by jumping out of the top of her cage, because there was just no other explanation. Or was there?  I placed a big screen on top of the cage so she couldn’t jump the 3 feet over the top.  Next morning I found her sprawled out on the couch, screen still intact.  She had dug up still more soil, and tipped over the spinach box again. I’m sure she was mighty disappointed to realize she’d already eaten it all days ago.  It took me this long to realize I needed to move my potted plants, or what was left of them, to a new location.

The one remaining possible escape route from this cage would be the tiny little doors that are all over the side, doors that are meant for parakeets or cockatiels to hop through.  This whole time I’d been convinced that she was too big to fit through these tiny doors, but today one of them was open, and it occurred to me that her head could definitely fit through.  If rabbits are anything like cats, mice, and rats, then anything their head can fit through, the rest of them can as well.

This is the last possible explanation to these genius escapes.  It’s either that, or she truly is magic.  And now I understand why rabbits are the go-to pet for magicians.

 

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