Critter Corner
Bunnies and Bathos
As much as it aggravates me that the rabbits eat my fledgling garden down to nubs, I haven’t been able to bring myself to spray the foliage with anti-rabbit goop or, in fact, do anything preventative at all. I actually like seeing them wandering around our front yard, and make only half hearted attempts at shooing them away when they nibble too close to “my” area.
Yes, they’re just destructive little rodent relations . . . but . . . I like them. Not in the, “Hey, I want to build a rabbit hutch and keep them for pets” sense, but they deserve a home as much as any other creature on this earth, and at least in my yard I know they’re not eating grass laced with nasty weed killer chemicals or fertilizer. . . .
In the last few days I haven’t been seeing my two regular visitors, and it’s been worrying me a little. This evening, on a walk round the block, I saw one laying dead in the road; victim, I think, of a driver who couldn’t or wouldn’t slow in time.
I couldn’t stand to leave it to get run over repeatedly and mushed into goo . . . so I went home, gathered my husband, gloves, garbage bag, shovel and the pickup truck, and transferred bunny from roadkill to forest compost-in-progress.
I feel very sad, as I always do when I see a creature killed by human carelessness or ego. Death is a part of life, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it; but that doesn’t mean we should treat it lightly, regardless of species or intelligence. I’ll admit I still have difficulty with caring about the death of a tick, flea, japanese beetle, or carpenter bee . . . but if we only save those creatures which are smart, cute, useful or funny, we’d be left, in the end, with a very sterile world.
My point? Well . . . none, I suppose. I’m just mildly grieved over the death of a bunny who may have cropped my petunias into the ground. And it prompted me to reflect on the nature on our relationship with . . . well, with nature.
And this post had very little, if anything, to do with my novel. Probably. But then again, with writers, you never really know. . . .
