Sesame and her seven little dwarves

 

Five years ago, we bought a pair of young rabbits as a birthday gift for our son Nicholas.

He chose the grey one, named it Sesame and gave the other rabbit to his sister. She named it Almond as it has white fur.

Sesame and Almond grew up pretty fast on carrots and pellets. Then we discovered Sesame was actually a female while Almond was a male.

However, Sesame was not your ordinary girl – gentle and demure as a rabbit should be. On the contrary, she was quite aggressive when Almond tried to get near her. She would growl at him and used her hind legs to give him a fierce kick on the face. Of course we do not know what went on between them when the lights went out at night!

One morning in early December 2007, we discovered Almond had died inside the cage. With sadness, we buried him under a tree behind our house.

Thinking that Sesame might be lonely, we got another rabbit for her. It has light brown fur and we named him Peanuts. Unfortunately, Peanuts too, died a few days later. It seems that Sesame refused to have anything to do with guys. Looks like he died from loneliness and we buried him next to Almond under the tree. By now we knew Sesame does not need a mate and she was truly an independent lady. We let things stayed that way.

Whenever I cleaned up her cage, I could see some furs lying all over the place. I thought she was in the stage of changing her old furs for new ones.

On the night of December 14^th, I was cleaning up her cage as usual when my fingers accidentally touched something soft and warm near the corner of the cage. And can you guess what that was?

Yes, newborn baby rabbits, all seven of them! Their eyes were not opened yet, their skins were transparent and they piled on top of one another. They looked more like newborn mice than rabbits.

Only then we came to realize that Sesame had been pregnant and now become a mother. She had quietly given birth to seven babies inside the cage when we were busy with our own chores and nobody knew what she had gone through.

No wonder she had been shedding furs – they were supposed to be used to line the cage to keep her babies warm. We quickly put some rugs as substitute and said sorry to Sesame.

The first two weeks were easy for everyone. The babies slept all day and cuddled closed to each other for comfort and warmness. They loved to pile on top of each other. We wondered how those at the bottom could breathe. Strangely, they found their way.

Sesame was a reluctant mother. She only nursed them twice a day for about five minutes each time and nothing could bring her to nurse them another round. Once, my children even held her down and put the babies one by one to her breasts but she put up a struggle and kicked them away. She preferred to eat carrots and sleep at her own corner than to bond herself to her kids.

Much to our amazement, all seven baby rabbits grew up very fast too. Sometimes we could bring mother and babies out to the parks so that they could hop around. From these outings, we found out rabbits actually loves to eat the dandelion flowers that were growing wild on the fields.

Three months later, the size of the young rabbits matched that of their mother. The cage got too crowded for them and they often fought with each other for space. When rabbits fight, they loved to bite each other’s ears. Their ears could bleed and I have to applied yellow lotion on them. They ended up with yellow ears most of the time.

We thought it was time to give them away to friends and relatives. Sesame was a beautiful mother and naturally all her kids were adorable, therefore they were never short of takers. Soon, all the kids found new homes and in the end, we were left with the old dowager again.

Sesame died a few years later from old age. She was buried next to her two husbands under the tree.

Today, we still remember them with fondness……..

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