Farewell to Charlie

Charlie was a rabbit who came into our lives about eighteen months ago. I introduced him here. He became a member of the family and we loved him. He spent mornings outside in his run in the garden, then came in when it got too hot. His hutch was in the front room, but he had free run of the house while we were at home. He got on fine with the cats, and a couple of them seemed to be actively afraid of him so he was never any trouble.

About a week ago, a neighbour called on us, asking us if we could rescue a rabbit which had been hanging around in her yard. It was obviously a domestic bunny which had escaped, but she was moving, and the new people had dogs which didn't bode well for the future of the rabbit. The woman had tried to catch her but had never been able to do it. My wife, having apparently acquired some sort of rabbit mojo, said that the bunny just came hopping right up to her and so suddenly we had a second rabbit. She's small, mostly black, and about eight months old according to the vet. Being female, it occurred to us that we may as well keep her. Charlie would have fought with another male rabbit, but if we had them both fixed, it seemed likely that they would get on okay and we wouldn't end up with a million bunnies. This would also solve the problem of finding a home for her given that the Rabbit Rescue people told us they had no room, just as they had before, which casts some doubt on what the rescue element of their name might refer to.

We named her Maisie - which had been Charlie's name before we'd realised he was a boy - and set her up in the front room next to Charlie's hutch so they could get used to the idea of each other, as they were clearly doing. She was worryingly underweight, but then so was Charlie when he first turned up.

My wife took them both to a veterinary clinic supposedly specialising in rabbits to be fixed on Monday. Before I'd even heard anything, it suddenly occurred to me that Maisie was surely too skinny for such an operation. My wife called and said she had bad news and I feared the worst. They had started to prepare Maisie, then realised that her heartbeat had become alarmingly irregular.

My own heart felt like it skipped a beat.

The bad new was that they hadn't been able to spay her because she was too underweight, but she was otherwise okay and we could try again in another couple of months.

The bunnies came home.

Charlie seemed fine the first day, if understandably subdued. We had pain medication to give him but weren't unduly concerned given that it's a relatively straightforward operation for male rabbits. We would have had it done before but there didn't really seem to be any need, given that it was just him and the cats

I never saw his back end, but Bess had a look and said it was terrifying and that she was sure it shouldn't look as it did, gnarly with huge Frankenstein stitches, swelling and so on; but, as I say, he seemed okay, relatively speaking. By Wednesday he was even more subdued. He was eating, but not much, and he didn't seem to be producing the usual steady stream of cocoa puffs. This had happened once before. He became constipated with complications before we realised that a steady diet of the things everybody assumes rabbits should eat - lettuce, carrots, and so on - was actually too rich for him. It was pretty scary, but we took him to the vet and he came though. Since then we had learned that carrots and the like were okay but only as a weekly thing. This time he was eating mostly just grass and hay, so we assumed it was some sort of reaction to the operation, possibly stress related.

This morning I got out of bed and found both Charlie and my wife missing. I called her phone. She'd got up in the night to check on him, then taken him straight to the emergency vet. He'd had diarrhoea and seemed in a really bad way but was presently being seen. She called back about thirty minutes later. Charlie had died due to complications from blood poisoning contracted from his own droppings infecting where his nuts had once been.

She brought his body home and I buried him in the garden, planting a wild petunia to mark the spot. Wild petunias had been one of his favourite things to eat. He used to tear them from my hand when I brought them in from the yard.

Today has been fucking unspeakable.

It has occurred to me that this surely can't be a routine occurrence following neutering, and my suspicion is aroused by the post-operative state of his back end and that some vet apparently already had Maisie prepared for her operation before noticing that she was underweight. It had seemed that way to me but then I'm not a vet; but none of it is going to bring my rabbit back, so I'm trying not to think about it.

He was mostly white with a few little black spots, and his fur was like cotton, the softest fur I've ever known on an animal. When I picked him up he'd sit in my arms and make a chewing sound, which is apparently the rabbit equivalent of purring; or sometimes he'd scramble up onto my shoulder as though trying to launch himself off into space. Recently, my wife bought a set of brightly coloured plastic cups, eight which nest inside each other like Russian dolls and made for toddlers but we'd heard that bunnies like them. Charlie thought they were great. He'd lift the cups out of each other one by one with his teeth, arrange them around his hutch, or in the water bowl, or line them up on the edge of the hutch and bat them off into space with his nose, then watch them fall with a look of intense concentration - like he was conducting an experiment.

He was the most wonderful rabbit in the world and he brought nothing but joy into our lives. If you were to ask me to list humans whose deaths would affect me less than that of Charlie, I could reel off the names without even pausing to consider.

This has been a generally awful year, and Charlie was one of the few good things about it.