The Secret Voice of Rabbits

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Nightmares and Parrot Wannabe's

Late, Like a White Rabbit

Hello again bunny peeps! It's me, RP, RabbitPhotog, and sorry for being so slow to get back to this series; The Secret Voice of Rabbits. I was getting ready to write this post right before Halloween but got delayed. So the day after Halloween, or rather on November 2, the Day of the Dead, or All Soul's Day, I had an eerie reminder to do it.

You see here at our little bunny photography studio, MagicMan (my photography assistant, rabbit handler, keeper, and spousal unit) and I noticed a long time ago that bunny rabbits love  movies. Oh, they love some TV shows, too, but mostly they love movies. They like the kind of movies in which the people talk to each other a lot. Not argumentative characters arguing a lot (although when done just so by top Hollywood talent, they do seem to love a good argument) but characters just having good, genuine conversations. One example is Miss Potter! But you know, we'll come back to that as I just know my esteemed bunny social critic, Thumper S. Thompson will want to weigh on that and he'd be upset with me for blazing any trails on that topic. So look for that down the road, folks.

A scene from "Miss Potter," (left) and Beatrix Potter's original pencil drawing from which this scene is taken.

So we have TV's with DVD players spread about the place so the bunnies can view some great entertainment. Mostly, it's horse movies like Seabiscuit, Secretariat, and War Horse, and literally a dozen others (after all, TST says horses are just really big bunnies!). But, as usual, I digress. The point in mentioning this was that on Halloween night, we watched a good Halloween movie, Fright Night. MagicMan likes it because he's a huge Dr. Who fan. Along with Colin Farrell, Fright Night stars David Tennant, who, MagicMan says played the best Dr. Who. I have to agree as I think he's probably the best actor to yet play that part.

 

The Scream

During Fright Night, as in any vampire movie, there's lots of screaming by the women victims. And then the night after watching it, we woke up in terror when we heard one if these screams right next to us! Imagine, we woke to hear a rabbit screaming! Rabbits only ever scream when they think their life is in danger, what was going on! I could tell it was coming from MagicMan's favorite little kooky, goofball buddy rabbit, Magic (yes, MagicMan's favorite bunny's name is Magic, coinkydink?). Was he having a nightmare? Did the movie we'd just watched the night before give him nightmares? We would never want him to watch anything that gave him nightmares!

No, Magic wasn't having a nightmare. He was wide awake when he let out his scream, although it wasn't a really loud one, a rabbit scream is truly loud and this was not. It was...almost like a mimic of a scream, a taunting type of sound. In his younger years, when he first came to us, this quirky little albino bunny did used to have nightmares and he did used to sometimes wake up screaming from those nightmares which, you can imagine, scared the bejesus out of us. So why was he taunting us and purposely scaring us?

A Rabbit Parody of Edvard Munch's The Scream

Magic had come from a very scary situation where someone had over 100 rabbits running around a small, suburban home breeding out of control. Almost all the rabbits taken from that situation were albino and the rest solid black as this is what happens with severe inbreeding. Many had parts of their ears missing as well, but for the most part, they were all in good health, probably because they were still pretty young. 

So here Magic came. He no longer had to fight over food with other rabbits, no longer had to fight over territory or anything. He has his own spacious custom-designed domain and a human who dotes on him like the way Tom Waits' character in Seven Psychopaths dotes on his albino rabbit. His nightmares lingered for a while after first coming here but then as he acclimated to the sound of several large parrots in the next room, the nightmares went away.

MagicMan and MagicRabbit cuddle on the bed.
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In becoming part of a family of avid movie fans, he, along with the other bunnies, watched lots of movies and TV shows and was carefully desensitized to them. Part of my background as an animal photographer includes an advanced understanding of operant conditioning, i.e., animal behavior, so the bunnies were carefully desensitized to scary movies over time. Movies like The Lord of the Rings trilogy with the Orcs, Uruk Hai, and whatnot, were part of that program. This went beautifully and many hilarious stories arose from the experience. 

Of Mimicry and Puppetry

All the bunnies became quickly aware that there is a very real thing such as talking animals. Not only that, but the ones who talk, do so very loudly. And if you think parrots don't know what they're talking about, then I suggest you read up on Alex the African Grey and free your mind, man (as TST would say). Don't think that your bunnies don't know what's going on either. Just last year, the top minds in science declared that animals are as aware as humans. With that comes a certain species jealousy which develops when an animal is first confronted with an intelligent, vocal parrot. When one of my parents' dogs first met my then young Amazon parrot, and was greeted with a hearty "Hello!", the dog, a highly intelligent poodle, looked shocked, ran off and sat in the corner facing the wall like he would do whenever he was being ridiculed. I felt sorry for the little fellow as I could sense his embarrassment and shame for not having a mouth which could easily speak words. But there are dogs that talk, too, and quite well. Like Mischka, the husky. Maybe you've even seen Mischka in one of her TV commercials for a bank!

The bunnies are no different. They listen and absorb what's going on around them and try to tell us things. Little Magic bunny has told us a couple of times now that he does have a pretty good sense of humor, and that he is completely desensitized to scary movies but that he also knows we are not desensitized to scary bunnies! So he will, very seldom, scare the pantaloons off of us with a fake scare by mimicking a scream now and then. We've noticed it's usually a day or two after we watch a scary movie (as we are not in the habit of watching this genre) but then, again, maybe he's being a movie critic, of sorts, in doing this. Or maybe he just gets a big kick out of scaring us! We know he has a great sense of humor, as many rabbits do, because of the way he uses his ceramic pellet and water crocks to imitate our Tibetan Singing Bowls alarm clock if we haven't set it. Yea, and he knows exactly when it would have gone off if, indeed, it had been set. I digress again! The point is, Magic Rabbit is a pretty magical guy with a wicked sense of humor. ¹

The point is, rabbits scream. But they may not just scream when they think they're about to be killed. Sometimes, if they feel very secure in their environment, and if it's a very stimulating environment in which they must really exude their personality to compete with showy and show off parrots, they may scream just to have fun watching your reaction. Or, maybe it's to get even with those loud birds. Maybe. The birds all love the bunnies, and the largest of our parrots even used to have a bunny as a pet. The bunny would sleep every night in the bottom of the parrot's cage and the parrot would very carefully do his business in a far corner of the cage. He would toss her some of his pellets, too.

But that's another story for another day. In my next post in this series, The Secret Voice of Rabbits, I'll talk about just one of the secret things you can tell your rabbit to help the both of you make a much better bunny photo. And I still haven't even gotten to the part about their secret voices! All in good time. Meanwhile, I'm pretty busy bonding some bunnies right now so I know Thumper S. Thompson will step in here to pinch hit for me with another post soon.

Until then, tread lightly!

-RP


¹ "Anthropomorphism is a theory which presupposes its own validity." -Dr. Donald R. Griffin, Animal Minds

 -RabbitPhotog

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Fear and Loathing and Leporiphobia

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"You didn't think I was serious just because I carry a rabbit around?!"

Thumper S. Thompson here with more thoughts on our glorious Halloween Running Bun Magazine issue this month, October 2013.

As you already know, Shauna, bassist of White Zombie and cover bun this month, is a drop dead gorgeous albino mini-lop rabbit. She has pure, heavenly white fur and beautiful white eyes. White eyes, you say? Well, yea, because if we collectively refer to the color of the pupil of an eye to determine what the 'eye color' is, then all humans have black eyes!

Obviously, that's not the case. Albino humans, who are legally blind, don't have black pupils but rather, dark rose-colored pupils and the same goes for rabbits. The color of albino bunnies' pupils can range from bright red to deep, deep rose but the color of their irises are usually anywhere from a pastel lavender to softest pink to white. Shauna, the cover bunny girl in question, has irises of the palest rose, really white. So let's not say she has bloody red eyes, shall we? And why does it matter? It matters to me, Thumper S. Thompson, bunzo journalist.

As far as albinism goes in bunny rabbits, the redder their pupils, the more albino they are and the worse their eyesight. Again, I'll refer to human albinos, they are legally blind. So a bun with blood red pupils has very poor eye sight indeed. But almost no one shows them the same patient tolerance and required legal accommodations to which their human albino counterpart is entitled. And rabbits are a freaking prey animal, for Peter's Sake! They can barely see and so, of course, they're afraid if some hooman with fast moving hands and body is hovering over them like a darned zombie waiting to disembowel them!

But rabbits, in general, while admitting that generalizations are generally a poor way to form any kind of opinion, are a spunky lot. They'll defend themselves, for the most part, yet many times they give a very tolerant snort to warn you that they're disgruntled with your behavior. Then, if you still don't learn, there is always nature's ultra effective device, negative reinforcement. This usually results in a 'bite' which usually isn't anything more than a nip. Yet, the deliverance of such is a blow to the ego and the emotions of the receiver. Yeah, it hurts hoomans feelings to have a cute little bunny rabbit nip them when all they're trying to do is communicate that they, the rabbit, are disgruntled with the inadequate intelligence of hoomans requiring this type of education from a supposed lower species.

The reason I'm telling you this is that an actual real life phobia of such celestially beautiful bunny rabbits exists and it is called leporiphobia. Leporiphobia is named based on the root word of lepus, meaning, of course, rabbit. Now these poor souls who suffer from this phobia have my deepest sympathy because they must go through life never knowing the truth about these wonderful animals, these albino bunnies. There is something so angelic, so pure, so ethereal, so perfect, so rapturous, heck, so celestial about these gorgeous animals, that perhaps the fear of them is really a fear of something more holy unto thou than themselves. Yeah, that's it.

I think I did once actually have a friend who had leporiphobia. But that's another story for another day, and it's a beautiful story I won't tell today. Today, I wanted to talk about how one hooman may develop this phobia if they happened to watch a certain movie; that movie is Seven Psychopaths.

It's a great movie, Seven Psychopaths. I loved it. Our staff  photographer, Rabbit Photog, likes it too but had a rather hard time with her initial viewing of it. However, I know there were two reasons she bit her lip as she watched it and she was determined to watch it; the first reason is because there are about twenty or thirty sweet little albino mini-rex bunny rabbits in it, and the second is because her favorite leprechaun was playing the main character and that would be Colin Farrell.

The movie also stars the master of deadpan comedy, Christopher Walken; emerging comedic genius, Sam Rockwell; Tom Waits as the gentle bunny handling tour de force; Woody Harrelson as a most truly psychopathic mobster; and Abbie Cornish and Olga Kurylenko in small, short-lived but forceful roles. My favorite female character is played by Amanda Mason Warren as Maggie, the wife of Tom Waits’ younger self. Linda Bright Clay appears as Myra, Han's wife.  

As far as the rabbits go, the lovelies make their first appearance early in the movie when Zachariah Rigby (Waits) shows up at Billy Bickle's (Rockwell) house in response to an ad Bickle placed in the L.A. Times. Zach then has tea (of course! rabbit peeps only have tea! with a mad hatter, no less!) with Marty (Farrell) and ensues the story of his transition from serial killer to gentle rabbit caretaker, a role which costs him the love of his life and wife, Maggie. As Zach gets up to leave, we see one of the rare occurrences of a Hollywood film demonstrating the proper way to pick up a rabbit. Carrie, the albino bunny, has been hanging out on the coffee table enjoying a carrot while listening to her hooman recount many, gory murders he has committed. Before that, a flashback to the horrifying murder at which Zach met his first rabbit again shows the innate gentleness of Zach's character. This murder scene flashback is also graced with the twenty or thirty albino bunny rabbits, all hopping about utterly unconcerned about the grisly hooman behavior which surrounds them.

A bunny drinks the blood of her caretaker after his grisly murder by Maggie (Warren)

The bunny makes an appearance again at the movie's end, post credits, when Zach phones Marty from a phone booth to express his disappointment in Marty over a broken promise, one for which Marty agrees to forfeit his life. While Zach and Marty talk, the bunny sits on the phone book shelf of the booth and occasionally stands up to explore the glass enclosure. One can't help but wonder if this is some sort of vague homage to Farrell's stand out performance in a movie named after such an enclosure. One also can't help but wonder, are there really any phone booths left in L.A.? We're also treated to Waits' brilliantly delivered line, "You didn't think I was serious just because I carry a rabbit around?" That line is sure to find it's own place of fame in movie history.

It's not often Hollywood treats us to such a nice portrayal of the bunny rabbit, much less the beautiful albino bunny rabbit. Hence, I felt all involved deserved a shout out to help promote this sure-to-be-a-cult hit comedy, Seven Psychopaths. All brilliantly written, directed, and acted.

However, for you faint of heart peeps out there, this movie is shockingly violent, gruesome, and unsentimental BUT no animals are harmed. Nevertheless, for some, the movie could actually induce a sudden, most fierce and unforgiving lifetime filled with the dreaded leporiohobia! Beware!

Zachariah (Tom Waits) phones Marty (Colin Farrell) from a phone booth with his rabbit, Carrie

Happy October, folks.

TST

 -Thumper S. Thompson

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