I know, a little late for the 4-H Fair

Some pets which have come through my life have actually been more like livestock, so I almost forgot that they had existed. Rabbits are kind of that way.

When I was a kid, some friends of my parents who lived just around the corner raised rabbits for eating. I never could picture that. How you could slaughter, skin, gut, cook and eat a rabbit, but I was only maybe ten at the time. Coz obviously I had no problems eating guinea pig many years later.

I don’t know whose idea it was, but before you knew it, there were two wooden cages with attached hutches in the backyard.  The girl bunny we received from the neighbors was all white with those eerie red-pink eyes. I named her Snowball, not my most original work. The other bunny, the boy, was also white, but he had deep blue eyes. My sister Pat chose Bright Eyes for him, due to those beautiful eyes. She actually stole the name from the book ”Brighty: Of the Grand Canyon” by Marguerite Henry. I can’t remember the book, but I know it was about a burro and I’m sure he didn’t have blue eyes. But somewhere in my Misty (another Ms. Henry book by the way) memories, there was a correlation.

Anyway, enough about the names. At some point, they did what bunnies do, they had babies, which it seems to me we gave back to the neighbors. I don’t want to think why. And in fact it wasn’t long before we gave back Brighty and Snowball.  

Good thing they were the only pets close to livestock which we raised. But I think that I still should have been in 4-H. 

Ok, so I took lots of pictures of the animals at the fair this past summer. I thought it was about time I did something with them, hence the whole pet rabbit thing. We really did own rabbits for a while. Really. But they didn't look anything like these prize specimens.