Enter the lepus

Somethings just aren’t meant to be combined. Oil and water. Bleach and ammonia. Drinking and driving. Donny Osmond and Eminem.

Also on that list are greyhounds and wild rabbits. I know that some people have managed to successfully mix house rabbits and greyhounds, just like The Dog and The Cat manage to coexist (given a proper amount of distance) in our home, but having a feral bunny bouncing around in your back yard is completely different. As soon as a greyhound sees something small and furry hopping around in the grass, thousands of years of instinct kick in and the brain checks out.

Having said all that, I’ll now give you exactly one guess as to what we discovered in our back yard recently.

If you said Charo, you’re wrong. The correct answer is a rabbit.

I’ve known for a while now that at least one rabbit had taken up residence in or around the big ol’ grass thingees we have out back by the fence (I’m not a horticulturalist). The Dog had chased it back into bushes in the middle of the night a couple of times before, but I had never actually gotten a good look at our little squatter until this weekend. On Saturday, it appeared just off our back porch, nibbling on some of the wild onion we’ve got growing back there.

The next day, I saw it sitting rather brazenly out in the yard in the middle of the afternoon. For an animal that had been doing its best to hide for the past couple of weeks, it sure didn’t seem to be concerned about hiding anymore. The rabbit was even putting up with a couple of noisy birds that were squawking incessantly at it. The whole thing seemed kind of odd.

Then I realized why it was out there in the middle of the day. It was a she. And she was keeping a watchful eye on her baby.

This complicates things greatly.

It was okay for me to let The Dog out in the back yard when it was just the older rabbit. She could run it down if she managed to get a good jump on it, but she never tried to bite it or anything. In fact, she’d pull up along side it and butt it with her snout. Great fun to watch.

I’m not exactly sure how she’d handle the baby though. It’s conveniently bite-sized and currently unable to run away at anything beyond a stumbly crawl. In fact, he had a hard time making it over some of the taller patches of grass. In a couple of weeks, he’ll no doubt be racing around like his mother, but for now he’s a little locomotively challenged.

And I can’t count on his mother to defend him. When I went out to get some pictures of them on Saturday, I spooked the mother and she just ran off, abandoning her offspring on the far side of the yard. I had to pick him up and move him back over towards the bushes so he could find his way home. Mom finally came back about fifteen minutes later.

So, since he’s kind of pokey and defenseless and I’m not sure what The Dog would do with him if she caught him, I’m now having to visually inspect the back yard before I can let the The Dog out to do her business. For those late night and early morning sessions, this requires me scanning the area with a maglite. It’s pretty awesome. I feel like a total idiot, but I don’t need the guilt of being an accessory to baby rabbit murder.

The real problem isn’t having to check the yard, though – it’s putting up with the idiot dog. Now that she’s seen rabbits back there, she’s become obsessed with finding them. She stands at the window to watch them when they’re out and about. She wants to go out about three times as much as usual. When I let her out, she stays out there forever, sniffing every nook and cranny of the yard. The whole thing is just dumb.

But I’ll keep it up for the next few weeks. Don’t have much of a choice.

We actually used to own a rabbit as a pet, but that’s a story for another day.

As seen online

• While I’ve been hiding from blogging, the good folks at cnn.com have continued butchering the English language.
• As someone who has worked at newspapers in both the print and online sides of the newsroom, I understand that sometimes you’ve got to run stupidly short headlines to meet space constrictions in the print edition. Online, however, you’ve got as much room as you need. That’s why I don’t understand who thought this headline from espn.com and this one from The Battalion were good ideas.Why be terse and vague when you’ve got the space to add those extra one or two words words and actually tell your readers something? (And yes, I know that there’s a sub-headline on each of those pages that tells the full story, but what about the main index, section pages and RSS feeds that only have that main headline? There’s no context in those spots to clue readers in.)
• Aw, screw it. Even the New York Times is doing it. I give up.
• There’s a lot to poke fun at in any livestock show’s schedule, but this item in particular made me chuckle. That must be a giant sifter. And “arrival of the turkeys” makes me think there’s going to be some sort of grand procession.
• Sure, making a few quick bucks by modeling for stock photography may seem like a good idea at the time, but then one day you wake up and to find out that not only is the BBC saying that you have syphilis, they also think you’re old.
• This comment on a Dallas Morning News article would make an awesome bumper sticker. And no, I’m going to tell you what the article was about.
• I knew that fire was pretty powerful, but I never knew it could create trains.
• Regardless of what you thought of the whole tea party phenomenon, I think we can all agree that our nation’s sign makers are all totally incompetent.