Dead rabbits

A few months ago, I decided that it would be an interesting experiment to try to start breeding rabbits with my neighbor, Ernesto. My thinking behind this was pretty simple: in Potrero Pucu, folks generally raise cows, pigs, ducks, and chickens. Other livestock is around and available (goats, sheep, even ostriches) but nowhere near the community.

So raising rabbits seemed like a way to promote another kind of meat (which has value in its own right) as well as a way to promote creative thinking, and since rabbits are fairly low maintenance – seriously, they eat just about anything besides parsley – they’re a cheap and additional source of protein for people down here.

Sounds reasonable, right? Heh.

Rebecca, a volunteer nearby – and our resident rabbit whiz – came out to my site and helped me build a rabbit hutch, and brought some rabbits to help me start my project. Two of them were pregnant. This was an opportunity, but also a problem, as the babies were born before I or Ernesto’s family were really ready for them.

The leverets fell out of their hutch several times, and even though I made some adjustments, all the babies ended up disappearing or dying. But rookie mistakes, right? This is Peace Corps. We adapt.

A few days later, one of the rabbits escaped out of the top of its hutch, which hadn’t been fastened properly.

This was annoying, but also not catastrophic. Benito (my host brother) and I made a second hutch and tightened up the first hutch. We’d made them out of fresh bamboo, which had loosened as it dried. Still, the hutches seemed to be working, even if they weren’t Frank Gehry masterpieces. This wasn’t the Chuchi Corps, after all. What did it matter if the hutches didn’t look super pretty, as long as they adequately housed the rabbits?

Rebecca found me a stud rabbit to impregnate the two remaining females. Everything seemed to be cruising along.

Then, a few weeks ago, a crushing wind – the strongest I’ve yet experienced in Paraguay – came through our site and knocked the hutches over. The male rabbit decided that Liberty was more valuable than an easy life of indulgence or readily available carrots and, embracing that most American of traditions, bailed. ( So much for those hutches being ugly but structurally sound)

So now there were only two… But they were supposed to be pregnant, so no big deal, right? Despite the fact that there was no longer a stud rabbit, we’d momentarily have up to 16 rabbits. I went to Asuncion earlier this week confident that the issues had been resolved – after all, the hutches were secure, reinforced, the rabbits seemed healthy and well fed.

Of course, when I returned to site on Wednesday, my host brother Andres casually remarked that one of the rabbits seemed to be a little sick. Its eyes were pink, he said.

This turned out to be a classic Paraguayan understatement. I found the rabbit shuffling miserably in its cage, basically blind. One eye was shut with what looked like conjunctivitis, lost in inflamed pink tissue. The other eye was a gasp-inducing mess of pus and blood that trickled to its mucous clogged nose. Even breathing seemed to be difficult for the little creature. In a hurried phone conference with Rebecca, I learned that the disease was probably one of two ailments, both lethal and highly contagious.

So I dispatched the bunny and burned its body, hoping it hadn’t infected the one. Remaining. Rabbit.

I should add I’m generally not a negligent pet owner. I’ve owned cats, hamsters, taken care of dogs, etc. I also worked at a zoo for two years – I’ve helped care for scorpions, snow leopards, groundhogs, and skinks!

But rabbits, man.

…

Joking aside, it’s been an instructive, embarrassing, and disheartening little snafu. It’s also a good case-study of the pitfalls that PCVs can face.

I approached the whole experiment with a laissez-faire attitude, that my neighbors would do a decent job caring for the rabbits and only need occasional oversight. But they weren’t proactive about telling me about problems, and had different attitudes about what constituted decent care for the rabbits. The creatures got enough food, but Ernesto didn’t upkeep the cages until after a rabbit had escaped. So if you’re going to do a project in this kind of environment, you can’t take a hands-off approach to it.