The Cozy Hare

03/19/2022

Birdwatching! Robins cleaning up the crabapples last Fall

03/09/2022

Ivory. Checking in.

03/06/2022

Making progress...

03/02/2022

Lights in a local restaurant. So nice to sit down inside to eat!

02/24/2022

Ivory's looking apprehensive. Time for nail trims. Sigh.

02/23/2022

Glider exercise time!

02/21/2022

Trying not to get poked! It takes a lot of layers.

02/17/2022

Easter - Bunny?

Have you ever wondered exactly where in the world the “Easter Bunny” originated? Well, I have and thought you might have too, so here’s what I found. I hope you enjoy this slightly off-kilter bunny-themed post!
According to The Researcher’s Gateway, (article by Galen Scott, (1)), the pagan goddess Ostara was honored by pre-Christian Anglo-Saxons as the patroness of fertility, renewal, dawn, and the season Spring. They celebrated by holding feasts in her name during the month translated as “Easter Season”. Her name, according to the Venerable Bede (an 8th century scholar), became attached to the holiday (Holy Day) after they were converted because of the connection with the renewal theme of the Christian Resurrection of Christ. This assertion appears to have been based only on the Bede’s beliefs, and I haven’t found any evidence to support it. (This article didn’t name the author, (2)).

In ancient Greece, rabbits were believed to be able to give birth without being exposed to a male, and apparently this “fact” was held to be true well into the European Middle Ages! [ Some researchers think that this was due to the hares’ (but NOT rabbits’) ability to become pregnant twice (!). Hares can actually gestate two litters at different stages at the same time!] As a result of this observation, paintings of the Virgin Mary often showed her petting a rabbit, which symbolized purity. And of course Mary is an integral part of the whole Resurrection story. In the Old Testament of the Bible, Leviticus tells the people that hares are “unclean” in Chapter 11 verse 6. Apparently the lack of a divided hoof was the telling point here, and so that made hares inappropriate as table fare at the time. Yay, that was a bit of relief.

Photo by Vincent van Zalinge on Unsplash

One of the famous Brothers Grimm, Jacob, wrote in 1835 that Ostara held hares as sacred, and he thought that the Easter Bunny was a corruption of the sacred hare.
Some early versions of a myth involving Ostara stated that she transformed her pet bird into either a rabbit or a hare, and that the transformed animal was still able to lay eggs like the bird it started out as being! A few of these versions held that Ostara performed this transformation to make children laugh, and then she gave the eggs to the children.

But the Easter Bunny we’re familiar with now, we owe to the Germans of the 16th century. They told their children that he hid decorated eggs, and that good children would find them. They encouraged their kids to make nests to attract the Easter Bunny to their home, and to leave out carrots for him to eat. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Pennsylvania Dutch and Germans who immigrated to the US brought our friend the Easter Bunny with them!

Easter itself has been related to the Babylonian Ishtar, goddess of s*x and fertility. Apparently her symbols were rabbits and eggs, and so religious scholars have associated the holiday with this goddess. (Author not stated, (3)).One result of this association has been to discourage the celebration of Easter as a holiday, but solid proof of the relationship between the two appears to be hard to find. If the emperor Constantine had decided to continue the persecution of the early Christian church, and stick with his familys’ traditional polytheistic Roman religion, you have to wonder whether the Easter bunny would have ever managed to get so popular! Maybe if he’d kept up following the Sun god of his birth religion, we’d all be burning sacrificial Spam(™).

Today, however, we buy easter bunnies and eggs made of chocolate, candy, peanut butter and marshmallow. Then on Easter day, we eat them all. (Okay, some of us start eating them as soon as they’re in the stores.) Why? It’s our version of the feast in Spring to celebrate survival through a sometimes harsh and difficult Winter. Some of us still suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder, which can be alleviated by using “daylight” bulbs in our lamps, getting outside even in crappy weather, and exercising. Our brains experience the “sugar rush” and that addiction is fueled by all the sweets we see in the grocery store.

Photo by Joe Myrick on Unsplash

Easter this year (2022) will fall on April 17th. The Easter season starts with Lent, which lasts for 40 days, and culminates in the Crucifixion and then celebration of the Resurrection of Christ. Each year Easter is celebrated on the first Sunday after the first Spring full moon, so that’s why it changes every year.

If you can’t wait for Peeps and chocolate bunnies and peanut butter eggs, here’s a video showing you how to make your own marshmallow bunny, and you don’t have to wait for Easter, either!

https://www.myrecipes.com/how-to/video/marshmallow-easter-bunny
I hope this rambling finds you well, and wish for you a Hoppy Easter and a lovely Spring and Summer!
Sincerely
LeslieAnne Hasty (The Cozy Hare)

1)https://researchersgateway.com/the-origins-of-the-easter-bunny/
2)ancient-origins.net/history-ancient-traditions/very-strange-history-easter-bunny-007908
3)https://nordicanimism.com/blog/is-easter-in-fact-ishtar-1

Learn how to make a marshmallow bunny for your Easter celebration.

01/18/2022

The Sumatran Striped Rabbit!

Have you dreamed of a striped bunny? Not just your everyday spotty bun, but a truly striped rabbit? I had never even heard of one, until a few months ago, when a story popped up in my newsfeed about a rabbit that had been caught in a fence, found by a farmer, and posted for sale on Facebook!

Apparently there had been a flood, and this shy forest dweller had somehow become entangled in a fence. Unable to escape, it was captured by a local farmer, who had no idea that these animals had been thought to be nearly extinct. Fortunately, some observant person caught the post, and the super-rare bunny was rescued, photographed, weighed and measured, and returned to the forest to a location close to its’ actual home territory!

What a story this rabbit has to tell its’ friends! It would be a true adventure story, starting with the flooding of the burrow, a frantic escape from the rising water to a place dangerously close to human habitation, and the frightening realization that it was stuck and at the mercy of predators of all kinds.

Then, the equally terrifying “rescue” by a human, time spent in a cage in a completely foreign environment, more humans looking, prodding, poking and flashing lights. How do think it would have reacted to the realization that it was going to be allowed out of the cage, back into the forest? Quite the tall tale…

For those of you who would rather have “just the facts”, here’s what I’ve been able to find:

The Sumatran Striped rabbit is also known as the Sumatran short-eared rabbit, and it’s placed in the “Vulnerable” category of the IUCN Red List. It’s been called “one of the rarest and least known lagomorphs in the world.” (McCarthy, Jennifer L., et al. "Using camera trap photos and direct sightings to identify possible refugia for the Vulnerable Sumatran striped rabbit Nesolagus netscheri." Oryx 46.3 (2012): 438-441.) It is native to the Indonesian island of Sumatra (as you might have guessed) and according to Wikipedia, has also been identified in the forests of the Barisan Mountains located in western Sumatra, in Indonesia proper, and a few surrounding areas. The major threat to this species appears to be loss of habitat, which has led the IUCN to rate it as Vulnerable.

This bunny has evolved to live in a dense rain forest environment, unlike nearly all other lagomorphs. If you’re at all familiar with rabbits in the wild, they mostly live in grasslands or brushy habitats. If you think about it, the grassland and brushy areas make a lot of sense for wild rabbits: Because they have fabulous hearing, and not so good vision, it’s very understandable that they’d need to be able to hear predators moving through that brush or grassland and not as important to be able to see the danger approaching. Also, a larger variety of foods available in these more open, mixed vegetation areas might be important in getting

proper nutrition to be able to raise lots of baby rabbits to adulthood.

If you’re at all familiar with “scientific theory”, there’s the old saying that the exception proves the rule. This rabbit seems to be that exception. My theory is that because of it being an essentially isolated population (stuck on a wet, rainy island) they just adapted to the surroundings. But why wouldn’t other rabbits have developed stripes?

It’s interesting to me that they’re also known as the Short-eared rabbit, and makes sense that they’d have shorter ears so as to not get them stuck in brush as much. Or at least that is my (completely unfounded theory).

Then I found some info about the Annamite rabbit, apparently also a striped forest bunny that lives in mountains in Vietnam and Laos, and related to the Sumatran rabbit closely enough to be placed in the same genus - Nesolagus. (Giao, P. M. et al. Anim. Conserv., 61–68 (1998).) Specimens of this lagomorph were first (scientifically) identified from remains spotted in a food market in Ban Lak, Laos in 1995. Since that time, more evidence of these elusive animals has come to light, and some study of the genetics of the 2 species indicates that the populations have been isolated from each other for “millions of years” (Surridge, A., Timmins, R., Hewitt, G. et al. Striped rabbits in Southeast Asia. Nature 400, 726 (1999). - link to article here: https://rdcu.be/cBzjy ).

So, if you’re really into rabbits, and you have some money to burn, maybe you could find a way to isolate that striped coat color gene and make some striped domestic bunnies for the rest of the world to enjoy! Photo of "begging bunny" by Stefan Fluck via Unsplash
Photo of multi-colored rabbits by Aswathy N on Unsplash
Imagine a world full of house rabbits of ALL sizes, shapes, colors and color patterns. What a sight that would be!!

09/29/2021

The Story of MaggieBun

Maggie came to me through an ad on Hoobly that I answered. The young woman who placed the ad had brought Maggie home from her sister’s house, where Maggie had been living as a pet with three young children.

Now, I have issues with people who get pets for their kids, and don’t teach proper behavior around those pets or enforce the rules about treating the pets humanely. So, if you’re not a person who feels strongly that EVERY pet should be accorded a minimum of good care, you may not want to read this!

Anyway, back to the story. SO, I answered the ad this young lady had placed, and let her know that I really wanted this beautiful, fluffy lionhead rabbit that she needed to rehome, and we set up the arrangements to meet. She made sure to tell me that this particular rabbit was “Pretty thumpy”! But I assured her that I was ready to deal with that. She also told me that the reason she had the rabbit to begin with was that her previous home had not worked out well. Again, I reassured her that I was prepared to carry out extensive therapy for this bunny. I packed a carrier in the car with hay in it, and set off to our meeting.

We met at a gas station and I had to scruff Maggie (this entails picking the rabbit up by the fur on the back of the neck right behind the ears) to get her out of the carrier crate she was in and get her into the one I had brought. She didn’t make any noise, but she did kick. Honestly, I’ve never had a rabbit that protested that much at being scruffed. After all, this is how mother rabbits move their babies if they have to relocate, and it’s one of the safest and most comfortable ways to pick up a bunny. So I was a little bit surprised by that, but no matter. I was already committed to giving this rabbit a good home, figured she was stressed by being in a car, and just wanted for her to be comfortable.

So, when I got back to the house, I had my son, Tyler, help me move her out of the carrier into her new home. She was NOT happy! When I opened the door to her big cage to change the water dish, or give her a treat, or put a new toy in, she would CHARGE! Ears flat, head up, super aggressive bunny! WOW! This was a killer rabbit right out of Monty Python! Ah, well, lots of work to do.

This went on for several months, but after about three weeks I did start to feel like I was making progress. Her cagemate, Little Bun, was a scaredy bunny who was smooth-coated and super shy. SO, they made an interesting combo in the pen. Maggie would charge toward me whenever she heard me putting my hand in the pen, and Little Bun would go the opposite direction.

Maggie did start to act better as she realized that I wasn’t about to poke fingers in the side of her cage or pen, and that no-one actually wanted to “bother” her at all. I could tell she was settling down when I opened the cage door one day and instead of charging, she just hopped over to see what I was doing.

After that milestone, we‘ve made serious progress! At that point we scheduled a haircut, as she was covered in matted, dirty fur. SO, for her first (as far as I could tell) grooming session, I had Tyler come and help me.

We set her on a towel in my lap and Ty petted her on top of the head very gently. This kept the teeth out of range and her mind occupied! While he did that, I gently felt out the mats on her belly, sides, and butt, and began the process of cutting them off VERY carefully.

We worked on this for about an hour all together, turning her around a couple of times in my lap so that I could reach both sides. I have to say that I’d never groomed an animal that was this matted up before,

and it was a tedious process. When we finished up, there was hair and matted fur all over the front porch. It looked like we had another whole bunny’s worth of fur on the porch floor! We hadn’t got all the mats out, but we HAD definitely made a dent!

After the grooming session, I figured she would need to rest and we didn’t really fool with either of the girls for a day or so, other than the routine stuff.

Next day, Maggie was bouncing like crazy around the pen, acting like she’d lost about 20 pounds! Well, I imagine it felt like that, after all that hair came off.

We’ve had two more grooming sessions since then, and Maggie is officially a pet. She comes to the door of the cage, or the side of the pen, when I call or or just walk by, and she takes treats very nicely from my hand now! Her rehab has taken about 5 months so far, and she still needs a bit more of a trim, but she’s improved so much it’s hard to believe that this was our “Killer Rabbit”!

The moral of this story is, if you have the opportunity to give a rabbit the chance to be a house bunny in your home, go for it! They make great roommates! Rabbits are quiet, affectionate critters who deserve more of a chance to be a house pet. They can (as a rule) be trained to use a litter box, aren’t as destructive or messy as some other pets, and will NOT make noises that bother your neighbors. If you only have an apartment, you may be able to keep a house rabbit where you might not be allowed a dog or cat, or even a bird.

The bottom line is that we as human beings have the chance to make life better for someone else, whether it’s a fellow human or a dog, cat, rabbit, or even a mouse. Pets are great for kids – not only do they learn about the responsibility of caring for something other than themselves, it’s been proven that children learn empathy if they’ve been around pets or had their own. And honestly, the world we live in today could use a lot more compassion and empathy!

09/22/2021

09/13/2021