This reminds me that I have had so many rabbits as pets in my life. Over fifteen, at least. All have died gruesome, horrid deaths, and I was always the one to find them, at the age of four, five, or six.

I got buttercup for Easter (it was a tradition with my family for a while to get a pet rabbit on Easter, you could easily bet the one from the past year had already departed). We let our rabbits run loose in our backyard. Rarely did we put them in the hutch. The winter I got buttercup we decided to keep her in the hutch. I came out to check on her and she had frozen solid! I picked her up by her feet and she stood straight up in the air. Horrified, I ran the rabbit to my bedroom hoping she would thaw. After hours of seeing the dead rabbit frozen in place in the middle of my bedroom, and starting to smell, I believe I let out a “NOOOO!!!!!!!!!!” like the ones you see in dramatic movies during defeat. Mind you, I was only four or five, so this event dealt me the trauma card for years to come.

I got Petey one Easter. I named him Petey because he looked like the dog in Little Rascals, with the black spot over his eye. Anyway, this is a pretty short story. I demanded to my father that we kept Petey inside the house that Easter night because it was pretty chilly. My dad didn’t listen, put him outside on the deck in a wire cage. The next morning a gaping hole was in the top of the cage and Petey had been brutally devoured by raccoons. My dad felt horrible.

Ozzy was one of those very large rabbits, all fat and lardy. He was a flighty guy, didn’t appreciate a warm cuddle I could provide, so it was a rarity that I could actually touch the old rabbit. One beautiful spring day, I looked out my window and saw Ozzy lazily spread out in the grass. I thought this would be a perfect opportunity to give Ozz a good pet. When I reached the rabbit I found that his stomach and other innards had been shredded, probably again by those damn raccoons.

I think we stopped getting rabbits at this point.