When I was a kid, many, many years ago, I was desperate for a pet of any kind. I always blogged about how I got my toy fox terrier, Caesar, thanks to my cousin Paul and his smart-ass remark. Well, thanks to Paul, I also got my pet rabbit. One year, my aunt Mary got her kids a bunny for Easter. That opened the door for me to ask for one. My mother broke down and took us to buy one. He was a golden tan color. I guess she was okay with it because he would be kept in the yard. My father built him a nice big cage and used the mesh from old screens for the sides. We named the bunny Yoyo, because he like to jump up and down.
Yoyo loved to eat. My mother bought rabbit food all the time and gave him left over vegetables or extras she had home. He got big and fat pretty fast. But, in spite of all the food we gave him, Yoyo wasn’t quite content. He learned how to make a hole in the screen of the cage and get out. My father tried to repair the hole, but Yoyo was always one escape ahead of him. When Yoyo got out, which was usually at 5 am in the mornings, he would never eat all the vegetables growing in my father’s garden. No. Instead, he went over to the neighbor’s garden and helped himself to their grand smorgasbord. This would them prompt the neighbor to call my house at 5 am and complain about the rabbit in their yard. Either me or my brother would have to get out of bed and go get Yoyo. The yard next door had a three or four foot drop on the other side of the fence, so we couldn’t figure out how Yoyo always managed to land there, especially when there was a beautiful vegetable garden a few feet away from his cage. I’m not sure how many times this happened, but there came a time when it was once too many.
WARNING: The rest of the story may be too harsh for animal lovers!
I always spent all or part of the summers at my cousin’s house. One day the phone rings and it’s my brother. He has some bad news to tell me. Mind you I just got off the phone speaking to my mother and she never mentioned a word of what she did. My brother proceeds to tell me that my mother put Yoyo in the shopping cart and took him to the butcher. She sold Yoyo to him for $5.00. The butcher asked her if she had any more like him. My mother said no. And she came home with an empty shopping cart. I was horrified to say the least. It was all after the fact and there was nothing I could do. Poor Yoyo, his life cut tragically short because he liked to roam and eat and because my mother detested getting up at 5am in the morning. I felt betrayed because she decided to do this without saying anything or looking for a more humane solution to the problem. On top of that, she seized the moment I was away, to plan Yoyo’s demise and she had no remorse. All she had to say was the $5.00 didn’t begin to cover all the money she had spent to feed him.
I never understood how she could do such a thing.
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