Bunny Battles

Well, we've had some ugly scenes here since Bunya's return. Lucy wants to be top bun and is not willing to concede to Bunya. They were so loving for so long but it only takes a short separation to tear apart that delicate relationship.

This morning's episode happened so quickly that one's brain can't slow down the action to figure out exactly what's happening. It's like from the old cartoon, with the Tasmanian Devil whirling around. Only in this case, it's two bunnies spinning around, falling down and jumping up, all in a blur.

Once the fight's broken up, the only thing that remains are the tufts of hair all over the pen.

Bunya

Lucy

In this instance, it appeared that Bunya came out worse. There were more and bigger tufts of his hair littering the pen. as an added bonus, Lucy pooped all over their pen. I don't think that these were necessarily from the fight. It looked more like Lucy was trying to claim the pen as her territory and proclaim herself alpha bun; the poops were almost laid out geometrically, with one poop at the intersection of every square foot in a grid pattern.

Of course, all of this is going on while Bunya is still sick. We are ecstatic when we see him drink water, eat hay, or poop. He is on mostly a hay diet, but to supplement that we have to force-feed him a high-protein, high fiber goo three times a day. Fortunately, my wife has really got this all down pretty well. There are three different size syringes (no needles) so that he can get his medicines and the survival food. Oh yeah, and she likes to fill a syringe with water, too. Bunya prefers to supplement his diet with cardboard ... not really the best time for him to do this, but every bunny needs a hidey box.

So for now, we have set up a temporary pen alongside the regular pen. Every 12 to 24 hours, we rotate which bunnies are in which pen. This is hopefully so that they will all get used to each other's presence again. I know there are lots of bunny people out there who have a bunch of rabbits, which may include some bonded pairs. However, you can't let the whole herd play and live together – I don't know how you do it.

Well. for moment of Zen, here's the entirety of my observance of Bunya eating some hay this morning. Unfortunately, it's not that long a clip...

At the end, you can see Ethel is shaking the pen gate, like: "Why is this closed? Humans are here, we should be running around!"