Today, we’re going to talk about rabbits. (Don’t worry, I’m not going to launch into a long tale about Volkswagens; I won’t bore you with another car story.)
I’m talking about little bunnies. You know, the little bundles of fur with long ears that hop to and fro.
Anytime you mention rabbits, the first thought that comes to mind is the Easter Bunny; and considering what time of the year it is, that’s a pretty good spot to start.
If you believe any of the Cadbury chocolates TV commercials, all sorts of animals have been auditioning lately for the position of Easter Bunny. They seem to think all you have to do is to tie a pair of outlandish ears to your skull, then wiggle your nose and you’ve got the part.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
As any little kid can tell you, the Easter Bunny is magic. Sometime, very early Easter morning, the bunny is busy out in the yard (although he’s been known to get inside houses and apartments, too) hiding his brightly colored eggs for the little ones to find.
Then, Easter morning, little children all over the land are out hunting through the bushes and around the hedges of the yard; often they find baskets of candy and other Easter treats.
Another famous bunny that’s sometimes confused with the Easter Bunny is Peter Rabbit. Peter, and his trials to escape from Mr. McGregor’s garden, is a tale that was first told in the early 1900s by Beatrix Potter, to entertain some of her little friends.
Potter gave Peter three siblings, Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail. And then, as her little children’s tales increased in popularity, a cousin, Benjamin Bunny, was added to the fictional forest menagerie.
(My partner, the Lady Marjorie, is a total Beatrix Potter “affectionado”; consequently, there are a number of books, illustrations and stuffed toy bunnies around the apartment. “Well, all the teddy bears I collect have to have company,” she says.)
Personally, I have a soft spot in my heart for ol’ Bugs. Bugs Bunny is a Warner Brothers cartoon character that was created by Bob Clampett after seeing actor Clark Gable munching a carrot in the 1934 movie, "It Happened One Night."
The rabbit even won an Oscar himself, in 1958 for best short subject, for "Knighty Knight Bugs." His voice was originally done by Mel Blanc (who was allergic to carrots).
When you’d mention “Wascally Wabbits…” around my parent’s house, you’d get set down and told the story of the bunnies that got into my mother’s garden in Detroit.
It seems that there was once a bunny that continuously kept eating her flowers. To remedy this situation, she bought an ineffective live trap that the little rabbit would then set off, steal the bait and then escape.
To fix the trap, my father carried it with him down to one of the race-car shops in the Carolinas he dealt with, where a bunch of engineers fussed over it for two days. They re-designed it and then shipped it back to Detroit and she finally caught the bunny.
Then, she drove 50 miles out of town to release it on the surrounding farmlands. The total cost of eliminating that rabbit from my mother’s garden had to have been several hundred dollars.
Aren’t you glad that you’ve just got the Easter Bunny and a few chocolate eggs to worry about?
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