It's that other time of the year when the humans go a bit crazy, otherwise known as Easter. Here's our guide to surviving the Easter season, rabbit style...
Greetings, fellow house rabbits. We trust you are all living a comfortable rabbit life, waited on hand and paw by subservient humans, etc etc. We are now fast approaching that time of year which, along with Christmas, sends humans a bit crazy. Yes, that's right - it's the dreaded 'Easter'. Here's our guide to the Easter season, house rabbit style...
What Easter should be about
A good number of humans appear to conveniently forget that Easter is, first and foremost, a Christian religious holiday. If, therefore, they subscribe to a different religion, a rather vague spirituality or just no religion at all, Easter should have little significance to them. Instead, in true human style, they all use it as yet another excuse to stuff their faces and lounge around for a few days. A tad hypocritical, yes, but go easy on them - compared to the spectacle of Christmas, Easter is fairly mild stuff. There's a big downside though - unlike Christmas, when the focus is usually on reindeer, penguins and so on, we rabbits have the misfortune of being the animal of choice for Easter. Oh joy.
What have rabbits got to do with Easter anyway?
Bunnies and Easter seem to be inextricably linked in the human mind and we are inclined to point the paw of blame at that strange, shadowy figure known as 'The Easter Bunny'. Even allowing for the limited intelligence of the average human mind, we find it very hard to understand how they can believe in a rabbit who lays chocolate eggs. Even If The Easter Bunny was real, it would surely be depositing a different kind of brown coloured 'eggs', ones which most humans would probably not be too keen on eating.
In addition to this, we are unfortunately traditionally associated with fertility due to the fact that we are far superior to humans in our lovemaking skills. But as most of us don't actually want hundreds of babies running around the place, we're actually secretly relieved when our humans give us the snip. And needless to say, our skills as lovers remain intact. So that's that myth destroyed.
What Easter is actually about
Regrettably, the practice of giving excessive amounts of presents at Christmas seems to have spilled over into Easter too. All very well, if said presents are inanimate objects, but we find it extremely alarming and downright insulting that some humans consider us bunnies to be 'presents'. The thought of moving in with a human without a watertight contract in place to ensure an acceptable level of comfort in a rabbit's life makes our hair turn grey. We're not sure who is worse - the humans giving or the humans receiving - but either way the poor bunny will usually pay the price, unless they have the very good fortune to end up with a human who (a) is capable of Googling 'rabbit care', and (b) has the inclination to actually read what they find. This is a rare occurence and the most our 'Easter bunny' cousins can usually look forward to is that their temporary humans will at least drop them off at a nice rabbit rescue, rather than simply opening the hutch door and trusting to 'nature'. 'Cos nature bites, and it ain't pretty.
Make Mine Chocolate? Don't mind if I do, thank you
When I first came across 'Make Mine Chocolate' some years ago, I must admit I at first thought it was a fiendishly clever rabbit-led campaign to lift the year-round ban on giving house rabbits chocolate - an 'Easter amnesty', if you will. Just a teeny, tiny bit wouldn't hurt us, right? Well, the humans seem to think so and go to great lengths to avoid us getting any. Spoilsports. As a side-note, I should point out that if you have your rabbit heart set on trying chocolate, just once, Easter is the perfect time of year to try. Most humans, as previously noted, are complete gluttons and will likely have several tons of chocolate lying around the house at Easter. Even if you only get to play with the boxes, you can still breathe in that delicious chocolate smell, and dream...
Anyway, back to the point. If you happen to live with an activist type human, you will likely notice that they soon become even crazier than normal and spend many feverish hours sweating over their keyboard, or rushing around putting up posters everywhere, desperately trying to stop other stupid humans buying rabbits for Easter. For once we are in agreement with our humans on this and therefore graciously tolerate the resultant decline in attention to our needs. Although we don't often like to admit it, we are well aware of how fortunate we are to have relatively well-trained humans and generously give them up during the Easter period to a greater cause. After all, we can think of no worse fate than languishing in a pet shop, waiting for a human to walk through the door, shove us in a box and then ignore us for 10 years. Can you..?
We have a dream... that one day Easter will become a time when some humans reflect on their good fortune in finding a couple of rabbits who have consented to live with them and train them up... and that all the other humans will breath a sigh of relief that they haven't.
We wish you a very happy Easter, fellow house rabbits and always remember - it's a bunny world, the humans just live in it!
