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?
