A Rabbit’s Death

Two nights ago, my Beagle, Banjo, and his sidekick, Zoey, flushed a young rabbit out of our shrubbery. Sadly, Banjo caught it from behind. He appeared at our door with a live juvenile bunny hanging out of his mouth. He was desperate to come inside and give us his present. It took two of us to pry Banjo’s jaws open and release the rabbit. The bunny was in shock with a broken hind leg and probably internal damage. It died shortly afterwards on our back porch.

This young rabbit was peaceful in its last minutes of life, but I couldn’t stop thinking about its death overnight and into the next day. She was about the age of my bunny characters, Lili and Desi. She, like so many young rabbits, was taken before adulthood by predators. But perhaps in the grand scheme of things, she lived fully as she darted along our property line, hiding in the ivy groundcover, nibbling on our grass, and giving the dogs exercise when they caught sight of her. 

This juvenile could have been eaten by one of the coyotes that frequent our neighborhood. She could have fallen prey to the three ospreys that circle above us daily. Instead, she was caught by domestic pets, which makes me feel sad that her life didn’t fit neatly into the order of things.

Maybe it is our human perspective that mourns the loss of animals and not the perspective of the animals themselves. They obviously feel pain and can be easily hurt when caught. Thankfully they go into shock quickly and seem to give themselves to death more easily than we do. But the short arc of their lives is part of their story, not ours. It is their life lived fully to the end.

If there is a lesson for me in all this, I think it might be to live as aware as possible in each moment of life, even when it involves loss. I will mourn that little rabbit for a time, forgive the dogs for doing what comes instinctively to them, and then I will re-discover wonder in the arc of my own story.