Bunny Speak

Most of the time when someone talks about rabbit communication, they mean the body language a rabbit uses to communicate.  Other than teeth purring or a grunty growl, you expect that you can talk to a rabbit, but they can’t talk back. Right? Wrong! Our bunny, Portia actually learned a way to talk back to us vocally.

Miss Portia

When she first came home with us, we noticed she snorted a lot. On her first visit to the vet, we asked the vet to check that it wasn’t due to a health problem. The vet found no nasal obstructions or breathing problems. Her opinion was that this one of Portia’s personality quirks, a means of communicating. Snorty became one of her nicknames.

For the three years that Portia was with us, we would regularly have actual conversations with our bunny speaker. We would talk to Portia and when we finished, she would snort in response. We found we could have whole back and forth conversations with her little snorts inserted into the pauses in our speech.

There were of course other huffy snorts followed by Portia turning her back or hopping away when we had offended her bunny sensibilities. There were also the muffled crying snorts when we had to hold her to be cleaned up or medicated. Portia was always a very vocal bunny. Only death quieted her sweet bunny voice.

Does anyone else have or know of another bunny speaker?

Hello world!

 

Welcome to our world of Rabbittude.  Take a rabbit, add attitude, and there you have Rabbittude.  We currently have two Rabbittude experts, Tigger and Shadow. They are seven years old (they would say young).  Tigger and Shadow have been entertaining us and driving us crazy for all of their lives since they came to us as two month old babies.

Shadow & Tigger

They were so inventive and creative we ended up creating a website, www.rabbittude.com, to share them with the world.  Now we are adding a blog feature so that they actually have more communication with the world.  We the humans will of course have to help them out with the typing.

 

Diving right into the world of Rabbittude, we will share what we hope will be their ultimate bunny stunt.  Tigger and Shadow have their snuggle bunny moments, but they are rambunctious bunnies and their relationship is a feisty one.  Meaning, they have never agreed on who is the top bunny.  For those very familiar with rabbits, we can feel the first question coming.  Yes, they have been altered.

 

Throughout the years, they seek to settle that question by hopping on each others head and a humping they will go.  Tigger is the most aggressive in this and we can sense from her body posture when she is thinking about it and start hollering, Tigger, NO!  She has countered this by taking to making flying leaps that land her sitting on Shadow’s head with her head and front paws by his tail and away she goes with a full body hump.  Since she is smaller, all four legs are off the floor making the activity pretty funny looking.  Shadow has started to respond to this by running out from under her or taking off with her on his back.

 

We can feel the second question coming from the rabbit savvy. Yes, we have regularly and actively sought to discourage this behavior without much success.   However, these two have never sought to truly injure each other.  There are no biting or fighting incidents and if we separate them, they hang out beside each others cages giving the most pitiful lovelorn jailbun performances.

 

Back to the rest of the story.  Tigger and Shadow were on the upper staircase landing when Tigger decided to launch herself onto Shadow.  She landed on his head with her head by his tail.  He decided to take off with her on his back, straight down the stairs.  The expectation at any moment was to see a rolling ball of fur going down the stairs, but Tigger and Shadow made it all the way down with Tigger piggybacked on top of Shadow. 

 

We told the vet about it at our next visit and knowing our buns quite well, she commented, “You had better hope that Tigger didn’t enjoy that.  She will do it again!”  Fortunately for our sanity and their health, the bunnies have kept the who’s on top on level ground since that one incident.

 

Welcome to our world of Rabbittude!  We would love to hear from other rabbit lovers and those who just really enjoy funny animals.  To you rabbit owners (or rabbit owned), what stunts have your bunnies tried?  We would love to hear.