Bunny CSI

Bunnies are SMART.
Now, I am sure, just like humans, intelligence can vary between individuals (witnessed in prior pets I have had, and many humans I've known), but never think you have a dumb animal for a pet.

To illustrate, I pull a case from the Bunny CSI files: The Team of Thieves - Bunya & Alice (now Theodore, but that's another story, Update about "Alice").

The bunnies learned VERY quickly that tasty things came out of this tin.

From the right hand column of this blog (things that look like bunnies), I offer Exhibit A in this case: This tin initially held an assortment of bunny-safe treats, purchased from our local HRS chapter (North Georgia HRS)

Sometimes, I would be on the sofa and give them treats from it. After a few, I would close it and put it on the coffee table.

"Alice" had no problem making herself at home just about anywhere she wanted, including on top of the coffee table.

After treats from the tin once, Alice started nudging the tin across the table until it fell off the table and hit the floor.

Then, "Alice" would peer over the edge of the table to see if it opened up to display all the treasures inside. It never did.

But just to see ... I would pick it up and put it back on the table. Same thing - "Alice" would nudge it over the edge and then peer down after it to see if that effort yielded a better result.

"Alice" must have done that a half dozen times -- and then Bunya caught on to goal of the exercise: Release the treats!  After "Alice" knocked it off the table, Bunya would run up to the tin and start bunny boxing the lip of the tin!

And here is the evidence in close-up. You can see the scratches around the edge of the tin from Bunya's safe-cracking efforts.

After a while, I would put the tin out of their reach. But once, I got distracted and was sucked into the vortex of working on the computer.

After a while, it got very, very quiet.

I got up and found Bunya and "Alice" by one of the legs of the coffee table, eating treats as fast as they could munch. "Alice" had knocked it off. Bunya had gotten it open. A successful caper -- they were in bunny thief heaven.

How does your pet show its smarts?