The first animal arrives

This Thursday Candy moved in. She is a 6 months old Rex rabbit, that will live in the stables next to one of the horses. It went so quick - from that we learnt that she was for sale (Tuesday) until she arrived (Thursday) so the last few days I have spent a lot of time on the web trying to figure out how to best take care of such an animal.

I have learnt that at least 80% of the food need to be hay, and they should not eat a lot of sweet things (like carrots and apples - only as a treat). Dark green stuff can be ok (like parsley or broccoli) - but not too much of anything. They should always feel hungry it said on one information site (poor things!) because that is what they are in the wild.

Since the children are away I will be the person to take care of her the first few days, which is a bit scary, since I do not really know rabbits that well. But this morning I felt confident I knew what to do. Rabbits want to use their teeth, so some  sticks and twigs from the garden could be a great way to entertain Candy maybe.

I went out in the horrendous weather. It was one of those mornings where the sky has fallen down to earth, and the wind is totally horizonal and the clouds cannot make up their minds about whether they should snow or just rain or send icy spikes on all humans they see...

But nothing could stop me. I went to the garden shed to get some good tools for cutting off medium size twigs, and then it was just to start. It was now I suddenly realized that I was not totally sure of which tree was the apple tree... But after some serious investigations I think I found one. The most important, I had learnt from my online readings, was to avoid cherry trees and plum trees.

Very proud I went to the stables with my collections of twigs. But, of corse, once I introduced them to Candy she just could not care less. She looked at me like "Who do you Think I am. A simple rabbit eating twigs?" Instead (or maybe because she had already smelt it) she quickly came close and tried to open my other hand, where I had the two small carrots for the horses... Smart rabbit! Poor horses... (But they did get some carrots too!)

 

 

Candy playing hide and seek with a box  early Saturday morning.