Bright Eyes....

[poliphilo]

Tosh was our first rabbit. We got him- nearly seven years ago- to divert Joe from indulging himself in a snake. Tosh and Joe used to wind one another up. Joe would thump at Tosh in the manner of an aggressive male rabbit and Tosh would get his own back by hiding under Joe's bed and dashing out to attack his naked feet. Then Joe left and Tosh became all ours. He was the friendliest rabbit we've ever had. He outlived several lady companions. Over the last year his companion has been Trigonometry (the least friendly rabbit we've ever had) who was sold to us as a lady but turned out not to be. Tosh bullied him. Their relationship was punctuated by terrible scraps which Tosh mostly won. 

Tosh died last night. Goodbye, little fella. 

Comments

[zoe-1418.livejournal.com]

The thing is, though, rabbits ARE innately social -- our colony rabbits, a couple dozen living together in a small barn with an outside run (and most of them are related), LOVE to hang out together, pile up in clumps, etc., even though sometimes they have to establish dominance even with their best friends. If they start out together, especially, say, two female littermates, they really bond. It's harder to get two grown rabbits to like each other -- or to introduce a new rabbit into an established household where there's already a rabbit. I'll bet we would have a bit of trouble introducing either of our angoras to the barn colony. Rabbits are definitely territorial (and females can be worse than males sometimes)... but if it's done just right and with enough space, it can work. -- We may have to create a very large outdoor enclosure, with plenty of hidey-holes, for our two girls who currently fight. On a car ride, they come together in shared adversity/fear, but when we tried it, we followed up by putting them together in a smallish enclosure in our yard. It didn't work well.