Today I want to remember my rabbits, Lavender (white rabbit), and Anya, or Lav Lav and AnAn as I tended to call them. Mini lops with another breed in their heritage (AnAn was a one up, one down lop).

Both rabbits spent the majority of their lives with chronic illnesses, becoming ill in the first months of lockdown. They were diagnosed with Arthritis at only 2 years old and in the months after Lavender passed away from a tumour or abscess in his liver, Anya was diagnosed with stomach spasms, painful occurrences that were random; Lavender likely had it also.

It wasn’t the happiest life. While we did the best we could for them and they were often very joyful, their combined illnesses meant that we were very often at the vets for emergency visits all hours of the day and night. At our best we had a break of 6 months. At our worst we were going every 2 weeks. Lavender was very hard of hearing and relied on his sister for a lot, including moral support and cuddles. He more often than not dealt with bad stuff by becoming depressed. AnAn was much more protective, the vets would get one of us to take her out of the carrier – she’d bitten most of them by the end – and reacted to vet visits with trauma.

But there was great joy as well. They were funny, they were cute, they binkied and zoomied a lot. One of my favourite memories is when I was trying to coax Lavender to come out of the pen one day and suddenly from behind, his sister comes flying past, obviously bored of waiting. Another is of Anya as a baby, a few weeks old, hissing at me because she didn’t want me to pick her up to take her back to their hutch. She looked like a cute tiny dragon, not the menacing beast she wanted to appear to be. Lavender would tell me repeatedly when I left the meshed shed window open in summer. AnAn loved to listen to me read aloud – her favourite book was Sarah Marsh’s A Sign Of Her Own with all its phonetics and beautiful writing. She hated Pride And Prejudice, too much dialogue that made her human mother too animated. In her last week I brought Sarah Marsh’s book downstairs to read the first chapter yet again and as soon as I started she ran over for a cuddle.

They had three homes within ours – a hutch, a purpose-built shed, and finally, once diagnosed with Arthritis, our living room. The shed in particular was a good choice – there was a storm the first night they stayed in it and in that storm their double-bolted hutch fell over.

Lavender loved going back in his shed after a day in the run. Anya meanwhile played ‘yes I will, no I won’t’ for at least at hour every evening – I’d tap the litter tray and Lavender would jump straight in for easy transport back to his house, but Anya would jump in and jump out again, even if it was pouring with rain and even after I’d ignore her for 10 minutes at a time to try and given her a fear of missing out. Lavender couldn’t stand any dampness at all. They were born at the very start of the heatwave of 2018 when there wasn’t any rain fall between May and September. The first day of rain was a huge surprise.

The past 6 years and 6 months – the time I had them over all – have been incredibly difficult. Since AnAn died a few days ago, a huge weight has lifted from me. I lived my life in utter stress and paranoia due to how often they got ill and how subtle the signs could be. I loved my rabbits to distraction. I also will never have rabbits again.

I do want to say that rabbits are the best pets I’ve ever had. They are extremely smart, have long memories, aren’t afraid to tell you to get lost if they are bored of you or if you’re doing something that isn’t in their routine (routine is very important – I decided to stay up and watch TV one night and got thumped at until I left the room), and they are very loving. Anya in particular was also very polite – she would thank me for cuddles by bopping me with her nose, she’d thank the water bowl for her drink the same way, she’d even say hello to the dustpan and brush I used to sweep up hay and food crumbs.

However they get ill very easily; their bodies have favoured breeding above anything else. If you’re lucky you’ll have a rabbit that needs a couple of emergency visits over a lifespan of about 12 years. If you’re unlucky… well, my story is above.

I wanted to write all of the above today as one post – the memories, the good, the bad. Given the amount of care I needed to give them, I feel I’ve lost children; they were my first priority always and I lost a lot of sleep over them.

Goodbye my AnAn, the beautiful girl who the vets had seen so much they also cried when she died despite all the biting. (She died of a freak stomach or liver torsion, we didn’t want to do surgery to find out which.) And goodbye again my Lav Lav, who we last saw in good health on Christmas Day.

Lavender Lazuli Place: 10th May 2018 – 29th December 2023
Anya Kuai Le Place: 10th May 2018 – 14th November 2024