We celebrated the fourth on the fifth at the in-laws, as it always is.
I was outside watching Tinkerbell do her tiny doggie business on the back lawn, and Wilma said, “Oh, good, that’s her regular spot. Yesterday, I was on the phone and she was hunched over funny and I started screaming.”
Wilma will do that, jump directly to the end of a story. Here’s the whole story, as told later by Wilma:
“I was on the phone with my brother, Rick.”
Gary interrupted, “You mean Uncle Dick?” Uncle Dick decreed ten years ago that he was now to be called Rick. Wilma is the only one who has complied.
‘Well yes.” (I am skipping the part in which Wilma discusses the Dick-to-Rick transition.) “Then when I was on the phone, with Rick, I saw Tinkerbell go over to that end of the yard, then when I looked again she was hunched over funny, looking at the ground. So I sent Ken out to see what she was looking at. He said it was a dead bunny rabbit. So I screamed — And you know that rabbit died from a heart attack because those kids in that yard were firing off firecrackers.”
“Excuse me,” I said. “Really?”
“Oh yes. It was an old rabbit.”
I covered my smile. “You don’t think the dog may have – “
“No! Rabbits die from heart attacks all the time.” She turned to Gary. “Remember when you kids had that bunny, the one that kept biting you? Ken took it to the vet and as soon as they put it on the exam table it had a heart attack and died.”
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I felt a little bad for laughing at Wilma, so I did some investigation on Google. I’ve found two bits of information:
One: Rabbits really can die of fright. I was wrong and Wilma was right.
Two, and I find this the essential bit of information: Miniature dachshunds like Tinkerbell were bred to kill bunnies.
3 responses to “On the Epidemic of Heart Attacks in the Rabbit Population”
Yes, and our dog was taken to a farm when it died. and my husband’s mother really did donate their halloween candy to orphans.I think we all believe what we need to.When our dog (labrador) killed a kitten we convinced my younger sister that he was just carrying the kitten back its mother rather than, you know, anywhere he wanted because it was dead.
When I was little (like 10 or 11) our dog caught a baby bunny as it ran out from under the neighbors shed. I made her drop it and then picked the poor thing up because it was so cute and I wanted to soothe it. Um, yeah it had some kind of heartattack and died right there. Ew.And I love the second little bit of information. That makes the story really priceless.
Katie – Sick! Sick but really really funny.Amy in StL – Okay, now I’m starting to believe that the pet Biter Bunny might have really had a spontaneous heart attack instead of a planned one-way visit to the vet.