Last month, at a picnic in the Salt Creek Forest Preserve in Wood Dale, Illinois, Jan Rebmann finally met Guinevere, the cotton-white Angora rabbit she’d scoured shelters across the midwest to find. No other rabbit would do, Rebmann said. It had to be an Angora.
Rebmann’s rabbit infatuation began Christmas morning nine years ago with Angel, a tiny English Angora her husband tucked under the tree. “I had two dogs at that time,” Rebmann recalled. All around her picnickers, some leading bunnies around on leashes, were admiring one another’s pets, exchanging rabbit health tips, and helping themselves to potato salad and cupcakes. “And I said, ‘Oh no, what do I do with a rabbit?’”
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“Well, she can do it,” Rebmann said.
But getting them to “talk rabbit” to one another can be an ordeal too. Rabbits are finicky creatures, says Neubaum, and fiercely territorial, even after they’re spayed or neutered. That’s why most every rabbit at BunnyFest stuck to its own separate, if proximal, playpen, and owners with leashed animals steered clear of other bunnies. The only rabbits to share quarters were those who bunked together at home. “But once they bond, they really fall in love,” Neubaum said. “They become very attached.”
According to Irwin, the chief problem is ignorance. People who lay down $35 at a pet store don’t necessarily know what they’re buying. That’s where the House Rabbit Society comes in.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Lydialyle Gibson.
