Prepping for a Rabbit Show Starts With a Trip to Urgent Care

One would think that when you are getting ready to attend a rabbit show competition that the last thing you can expect to be doing is sitting in the urgent care waiting to see a doctor for stitches but that is right where my daughter and I were on Friday the 15th instead of loading the van and filling carriers with our show rabbits.

It started out with a normal enough morning.  We got up and fed all the animals at the rabbitry then we finalized the list of rabbits we wanted to consider taking and started prepping transport carriers and my box of supplies that I always take with me.  Well, one of the things I always do before putting each of the rabbits into their transport carrier is weigh them one last time to confirm their size and make sure that there won't be any last minute surprises or D/Q's for being over or under weight for each rabbit's age group.

Both my older daughter's were helping with this task and while I was busy getting the next rabbit out my oldest opened and reached in to pick up one of our junior black bucks for weighing.  Now this buck has had some wonderful results on the show table up to this point, but has also showed signs of having a bit of a mean streak.  Until this particular morning he has never bitten anything except our big sleeves on our winter coats and I was giving him a cautious pass until spring, because maybe it was something about the puffy coat and the noise it made that set him off.  Well that all ended the moment my daughter reached into his hutch.

He lunged at my daughter's hand and managed to grab hold and bite down on the meaty part of one of her fingers.  And I mean he bit down hard.  She started screaming and crying and tried to lift her hand out of the cage and away from him when he flipped over and started kicking his hind feet into her arm.  At that point she jerked away from him as I turned to see what was going on and to my horror I see a 7.5 lb rabbit hanging from my crying daughter's hand.  She was finally able to get him to let go and I quickly shut the door to his hutch.

After one quick look at her finger I told her to run to the house and wrap it in a clean towel because she was going to need stitches and we were going to the urgent care right now.  All preparation stopped as I called my husband at work to fill him in and bolted to the house with the other kids who were helping trailing behind me.  Fortunately Seriah's teenage sister is only a year younger than her and is responsible enough that I could leave her to watch her siblings for 20 minutes until her father could get home so I could take Seriah to see the doctor.

The urgent care was able to get her into a room quite quickly and after two or 3 stitches and a finger wrap to immobilize it; she was patched up, given a prescription to prevent infection because the bite was very deep and we were on our way home again.  As we talked about what happened and played the event over carefully, we were unable to determine any trigger on our part that would have justified him getting defensive let alone attacking my daughter like that.  So regardless of how he had done on the show table, one of things I am a stickler for is temperament.  With so many wonderful rabbits in the world I see absolutely no point in risking my kids with injury and keeping ones that have a mean streak of any kind.  Which means we now have one less rabbit that went to the show and one less rabbit to house and feed at this point.

I am also certain that I could not in good conscience sell a rabbit with that kind of disposition to another person and so this one is going to become rabbit curry in the near future.