My neighbor from down the road, father of my proper neighbor nearer by came by. He’s got to be in his eighties, he rode his red tractor down the road to knock on my door and let me know that there was a black rabbit hiding under his car. He thought that since we have chickens, we might want it. It wasn’t in a cage, he hadn’t caught it, he thought we might be able to catch it if we wanted it, and he wanted to check if we wanted it. 

I thought it was quite nice, actually. Abby thought it was weird. I thought it was weird, too, but also nice. The way of building community and meeting folks out here is something I’m still coming to understand and getting used to. Rabbits are olive leaves, I suppose. 

My first thought was of farming the rabbits, rabbit meat is efficient and delicious. But they scream when you kill them, and are mammals. I’d have a tough time with that.

Maybe we can rank the country fitness of our neighbors by how comfortable they’d be farming rabbits. I don’t know if anyone around here would be. Directly across the street they keep pigs for the summer. Killing a pigs no small thing, but they don’t do it themselves. Rabbits are small enough in size and in number that it’d be strange to hire someone to do the deed for you, so it’d be on your hands, and that’s more than most people can handle, it’s more than I can. I can’t kill chickens myself. 

I’ll pluck them and gut them and seal them and eat them, but I won’t do the actual death part. That’s hard for me. Maybe that means I’m not cut out for real country life, or maybe it means that I really am. Difficult to tell. 

What I wonder, is will the coming months and years of parenthood change my reaction to the offer of a rabbit from: Should I start farming rabbits? to Would a rabbit make for a good pet? Potentially. Depends on the child, and on loads of other things besides.