kellycrutcher1 is trying to stop thinking because it hurts too much to do it
My parents and I raised an abandoned wild rabbit when I was a little girl.
I had to a lot of walking for exercise when I was little, and the three of us were out for one of our nightly walks up and down Wallace Avenue when we unknowingly spooked this mother rabbit who’d been moving her newborn babies across the road. She dropped one baby and took off; Mom and I started screaming “there’s a baby in the road” to Dad. He came running and found the bunny.
The little thing was big enough to be held in one hand; it hadn’t even opened its eyes yet; it didn’t have any fur.
You could barely tell it was a rabbit. Anyone looking at it, if they hadn’t seen a mother rabbit drop it, wouldn’t have known what kind of newborn animal it was.
We waited a little bit, but the mother didn’t come back, so we took it home (Mom carried him home in her skirt) and all three of us made a bed for it to keep it warm. We weren’t sure if it would live through the night. We called the vet down the road and told him what had happened; he said for us to come by; he had specific bottles for orphaned newborn kittens and puppies.
The vet said yogurt was closer to a mother rabbit’s milk; we’d have to get it room temperature, water it down and bottle feed the baby; we’d have to keep the bunny warm and do round the clock feedings on it to keep it alive. We did what he said.
I don’t remember a lot of details from back then, but I do remember that our rabbit lived a LOT longer than he would have in the wild, staying in excellent health and finally dying peacefully in his sleep of old age. All of us loved him and took care of him; I named him Little Georgie after my favorite character in the novel “Rabbit Hill.”
To this day, I don’t regret one bit of it. We did the right thing and it was well worth it; we saved an animal’s life. If I had to do it over again, I’d do the exact same thing.
