Enslaved by Ducks Page 2

  Our animals have provided me with the only subject besides music that I’ve ever felt impassioned to write about. Since CC Smith balked at turning over her entire magazine to the art of trimming rabbit teeth, I knew I needed to explore those weighty subjects in a book. I also wanted to grapple with the unlikely series of events that had changed me into an animal lover. The long, smooth slide from keeping one animal to housing more than two dozen amazes me as much as the fact that I’m willing to expend energy on them. I’m so lazy, I’ll take an entire month to clean my upstairs office by shuffling around a few mounds of junk per day. Yet pets have compelled me to perform backbreaking labors that would wake me screaming from a dream.

  I also thought that telling the story of Bob and Linda might serve an instructive function. Books about raising dogs and cats are plentiful. Bookstores abound in how-to guides on naming, grooming, potty training, feeding, and deworming felines and canines, as well as narratives of joyful ownership, psychic abilities, and heroic exploits of Fido and Tabby. But when we tried to locate a book on keeping ducks, geese, turkeys, doves, and even rabbits as pets, we came up empty-handed. Instead, we found handbooks on backyard fowl filled with gorgeous photos of breeds alongside helpful sections on butchering. And though the literature on parrots has grown over the last few years, I had to read between the lines to realize that you attach yourself to one of these willful animals at your peril.

  I thought, too, that I could use my book to warn about the pitfalls of keeping pets: The bunny with the charming overbite will strip your living room carpet bald. Backyard ducks that supposedly “take care of themselves” require more maintenance than the space shuttle. And the goose you got for free could get sick, and empty your pockets faster than a trip through airport security. I heard experts claim again and again that owning pets reduces stress and might extend your life. I tried to remember that as I dragged a hose out of the basement to fill the ducks’ plastic swimming pool in January weather so cold, the snow complained as I stepped on it. I wondered: Who wants to live longer under those conditions? Why didn’t anyone warn me?

  While these were all good reasons for thinking about writing a book, it took a push from an animal to turn thought into action.

  I was struggling to eat a sandwich one Sunday afternoon as Linda returned from a potluck at her church. Sitting in the dining room was out of the question. Our green parrot, Ollie, threw himself into a squawking fit as soon as I sat down at the table to cut my sandwich in half. The African grey parrot, Stanley Sue, countered with a few bright “I want” chirps that degenerated into raucous complaints and bell ringing as I took my first bite. I moved to the living room only to find myself still within Ollie’s field of view.

  “I’m taking my lunch outside,” I said to Linda.

  “Well, don’t sit out on the deck,” she warned. “He can see you through the window.”

  “That’s fine. I won’t be able to hear him.”

  “That’s what you think. I could hear him out in my car.”

  I headed for the backyard, but then I realized that if the ducks and geese knew I was outdoors they would clamor to get out of their pen. My sandwich and I roamed the front yard, eliminated it as too close to the road and the exhaust fumes of passing cars, and settled on a soft patch of grass near the front of the barn, invisible to the turkeys behind it. They would yip like dogs when they saw me, and I wanted to eat in peace. The spot I chose felt safe. A massive fir tree that seemed to double in size every year shielded me from the house. Leaning against the post that supported the satellite dish, I raised my sandwich to my mouth just as our black cat, Agnes, leaped upon my lap from out of nowhere and begged for a taste.

  Defeated, I shared my lunch with her. A few minutes later, I trudged into the house, sat down at the word processor, and started thinking about our animals—trying to figure out why I had rearranged my life to accommodate theirs.

  CHAPTER 1

  Belligerent Binky

  After living so long in the city, I felt peculiar at the farmhouse in Lowell. Looking out the window and seeing woods instead of another window disoriented me. So did waking up to songbirds and a shotgun blast from across the river rather than to car horns and a pistol shot from down the street. I had trouble getting used to the well house outside the back door, the hulking wood furnace in the basement, and the wall of brambles beyond the fence. Strange beasts prowled the property by night. Vultures sailed overhead by day. Stanchions in the barn and a rusted-out cattle trough on the edge of the swamp told of other animal residents—all part of the past, I told myself. But my wife-to-be, Linda, had ideas of her own.

  Linda couldn’t wait to start crowding every surface in the house with knickknacks. The same three-acre plot of land whose flooding riverfront and mysterious boulder heaps intimidated me struck Linda as an unbounded gardening opportunity. But she wasn’t so certain about living with me. Her original plan had been to live part time in her northern Michigan cabin. But once we got married a few months later, she changed her mind. I couldn’t even get her to move out to the barn. Harmony ran rampant. And then we got Binky.

  Buying Binky was one of the most pivotal, far-reaching actions of my adult years, and it’s inexcusable that I can’t retrace the tortured chain of reasoning that convinced me that having a rabbit was a good idea. Binky was more than just a bunny. He transformed our house from a pristine, animal-free environment into an indoor petting zoo. He changed my life forever. When I ponder my pet-free past, I ask myself not only why I ever agreed to buy him, but also how a sour dwarf Dutch rabbit with few social skills ended up embodying an argument for more animals rather than none.

  It was during our first spring together in the house that Linda lobbied me for a bunny. “Wouldn’t it be fun to have a little animal hopping around the house?” she asked.

  “You sort of hop when you walk,” I told her. “If you worked on it a bit, we wouldn’t need a rabbit.”

  “You couldn’t find an animal that’s less trouble,” she insisted. “My friend Justina has a bunny, and it just hangs out near the clothes dryer and uses an old towel for a bed.”

  “Then where will you sleep?” I asked her. But I had learned that it was useless arguing with anyone as strong-minded as Linda.

  Before I met Linda, she had owned a couple of dogs and now missed having them. A rabbit seemed like an easier alternative. I knew that a dog had to be walked, bathed, brushed, housebroken, lugged around in the car, trained to bark rarely, taught not to knock down the elderly, flea-powdered, dewormed, pooper-scooped, spayed or fixed, deflected from visitors’ crotches, kept away from fellow dogs, protected from roaming skunks, talked to through a vacuum cleaner hose, fed, licensed, vaccinated, and generally made a part of the family pack. The world of a panting, ever-hungry, free-range hound was also my world, while the world of a small caged animal was merely a three-foot cube. So went my thinking at the time.

  A visit to my friend Philip’s seemed to confirm the trouble-free nature of owning a rabbit. As we sat in his living room, I asked him if he might let his bunny, Drusilla, out of her cage.

  “Oh, she’s already in here somewhere, probably hiding behind a chair,” he said.

  As I stood up, I caught the barest glimpse of fur backing into the shadows. Compared to the lap-bounding behavior of a cat or the pet-me persistence of a dog, Drusilla’s reticence appealed to me. “Is this all she ever does?”

  “She basically has two modes. When she first comes into a room, she’ll run all over the place as fast as she can. After that, she just stays in one spot unless you can convince her there’s a reason to come out.” This sounded ideal. I dismissed as sheer whimsy the caution that came next. “She does have an attraction to electrical cords. I usually unplug anything I’m not using and put the cords out of her reach before I let her into a room. Otherwise, she goes right for the cord and bites it cleanly in two.”

  “And she doesn’t get a shock?”

  “Rabbits’ mouths are very dry,”
Philip surmised. “They don’t have much saliva, so she doesn’t get the same jolt you would get if you tried biting through a lamp cord.”

  The notion of my acquiring a taste for plastic-coated copper wire was so preposterous, I filed the matter away with Philip’s other peculiarities—such as keeping a two-year-old Thanksgiving turkey carcass in his refrigerator’s vegetable crisper. Some mysterious agent was undoubtedly putting the guillotine to Philip’s appliance cords and pointing the finger at his bunny.

  I told Linda about Drusilla’s alleged taste for electrical cords.

  “My customer Rose has a bunny, and she doesn’t have that problem,” she said.

  “I thought Justina had the rabbit.”

  “Rose has one, too,” said Linda, who ran into all sorts of colorful people in her job as a housecleaner. “He sits on Rose’s lap while she watches Wheel of Fortune.”

  “That’s my favorite show!”

  “I know.”

  “And the bunny would sit on my lap?”

  All at once, the road to bunny ownership seemed as smooth and straight as a good intentions–paved superhighway. But in an attack of poor judgment, we ended up choosing a rabbit that showed signs of being exactly the opposite of what we wanted. To start with, it had never dawned on us to do anything as sensible as research before making our selection. Our assumption was that except for variances in size, a bunny was a bunny. Who would have suspected that different breeds might possess different personalities?

  Apparently not the farmer just north of the village of Rockford, who had posted a hand-lettered sign in front of his trailer succinctly advertising RABBITS. To Linda’s horror, the farmer raised “meat pen” animals, bred especially for the dinner table. Chastened, she tried another farm down the road that sported similar advertising. This time the rabbits were for sale as pets, but all of them were the French lop variety, a breed whose floor-dragging, excessively floppy ears make it resemble a stuffed-animal designer’s notion of a cocker spaniel puppy. Linda favored what she termed a “Cadbury bunny,” an alert, upright-ear rabbit. The lop-ear breeder, a man with normal ears of his own, suggested that we attend the annual Easter Bunny Show at North Kent Mall the following weekend.

  In my graduate-school days I had visited a San Francisco cat show so chockablock with attractive and distinctive breeds of felines, I left vowing never again to use the vulgar term “kitty.” And Linda had encouraged my attendance at craft fairs and antique shows brimming with countless numbers of undifferentiated items and varied things. I imagined that the North Kent Mall Easter Bunny Show would be a combination of these.

  Instead, the event was a celebration of vacant real estate. Staggered within a vast aisle of acreage that yawned past joyless, deserted shoe stores were exactly three Bunny Show conglomerations of less than six cages each. The first aggregate held a few miniature breeds like the Netherlands dwarf. It reminded me of a guinea pig with Popsicle-stick ears. Never mind that we would later learn that the breed was considered to be remarkably affectionate. The next batch of cages contained the dreaded French lop, renowned for its gentleness and pleasant nature. We passed it by. On the last cluster of tables were several California-breed “meat pen” bunnies a little too large and salty for our tastes, plus dwarf Dutch bunnies. A judge at the Kent County 4-H Youth Fair in Lowell would later charitably describe the dwarf Dutch breed as “moody.” We zeroed in on one of these.

  A small bristle-haired boy was petting a midsize, amiable rabbit who was stretched placidly on the tabletop exhibiting no urge to squirm or bolt. Like a cat taking an extended nap, it basked in human companionship. We could not resist stroking the rabbit’s back while chuckling at its coloring, which comically suggested black britches and a black head cowl with milk-white fur in between.

  “Is this one for sale?” Linda asked excitedly.

  “She’s the mother,” the boy told us without looking up.

  “But is she for sale?” I asked. “How old is she?”

  “Thirteen months.”

  Linda and I took a hasty conference. An age of a year and a month seemed elderly by rabbit standards, especially when we’d had our minds set on a blank-slate baby bunny that we could lovingly raise and mold to our wills. A breeder had told us that males make better pets than females, presumably, I realize in retrospect, because their habits of mounting anything that moved and spraying the furniture in tomcat fashion appealed to his darker side. Still, the mother bunny did have the quiet temperament we were looking for. We visibly leaned in her direction.

  “These are from her litter,” the boy told us, indicating a trio of eight-week-old dwarf Dutches in an adjacent cage. If the mother was friendly and people-loving, surely her offspring would follow suit, we reasoned, forgetting the lesson of Cain.

  “That one sure is cute,” Linda said.

  “Has he seen Wheel of Fortune?” I asked.

  “You like him?” beamed a round-shouldered man wearing a plaid shirt and a nametag that identified him as Warren. “I favor the Dutches, too,” he admitted, and indeed there was a resemblance around the teeth and jowls.

  “Can we hold him?” Linda asked.

  “Sure,” Warren assured us with a doubtful air. No sooner had he unlatched the wire door and slid his hand into the cage than did the docile bunny absently nibbling on the steel spout of his water bottle turn into a churning, clawing, parcel of disdain for human contact. Despite his diminutive size, he packed a wallop via muscular back legs whose sole purpose, honed by eons of evolutionary development, was to propel him forward by kicks. With the practiced dexterity of a juggler, Warren tipped the writhing bundle into Linda’s arms, but she could not hold him. Neither could I.

  “Are there any other boys?” Linda asked as Warren returned the rabbit to his cage. As soon as his feet touched the cedar-chip bedding, he reverted to a picture of innocence.

  Warren shook his head. “All the rest are females.”

  We weighed our options. The pair of breeders Linda had visited near Rockford didn’t have what we wanted, and the notion of seeking out other breeders, visiting the numerous pet shops in our area, or waiting even another instant never entered our minds.

  “It may be that he just doesn’t know you yet,” Warren offered.

  “We’ll take him!” we essentially shouted.

  That man knew how to close a sale. Since we lacked the prowess and body armor to carry our purchase from mall to parking lot, Warren packed our bunny in a sturdy cardboard box. All the way back to Lowell, he scratched and bit the carton in a preview of the carpet-pulling, shoe-destroying, antisocial behavior to come. Within an hour of installing him in our home, Linda had managed to convey our new pet to the couch using an embrace resembling a wrestling hold that restricted his struggles to angry wiggles.

  “He just needs to get used to being held,” Linda suggested, interpreting my vigorous head-shaking as permission to drop him in my lap.

  “Let’s give him a few days,” I suggested as I fought to restrain his clawing feet.

  “See. He’s settling down.”

  “He hasn’t any choice. If I loosen my grip, I’ll probably lose a hand.” But after a few seconds, tremors ceased to rock his body and he started to relax. “Well, maybe you’re right,” I told Linda, precisely as the rabbit cemented the relationship between us by peeing enthusiastically all over my pantleg and the front of the couch.

  In the days ahead, I made a game effort at bonding with Binky, whom we named after the sullen rabbit in Matt Groening’s comic strip Life in Hell. Mimicking photos of Dian Fossey communing with mountain gorillas, I sprawled across the kitchen linoleum in an unthreatening, welcoming posture as Binky hopped around me obliviously. But I was merely a navigation obstacle. I even brought a pillow into the room, dowsed the lights, and feigned a nap to put him at ease with my presence. Ease wasn’t the problem, however, as Binky proved whenever we offered him a banana. He’d be at our side in a flash, front paws resting on our wrist for extra eating leverage. His no
tion of affection was deigning to share a room with his back to us. When feeling especially generous, he’d allow us to squat behind him and give his head and ears a few brisk strokes. If further intimacy was pressed on him, he’d shake our hands away, hop to a human-free zone across the room, and lick himself where we had touched him.

  We wheedled Binky with a fancy water bottle, litter box, and chew toys, fed him tortilla chips and buttered toast, built him an outdoor exercise pen, and allowed him unrestricted run of the house, yet he still displayed what we would come to know as typical rabbit belligerence. We bought him a lavender-colored leash and matching Chihuahua-scaled harness, which he hated, and took him out in our woods for ill-conceived walks that alternated between Binky welding himself to one spot and bolting ahead so quickly, we couldn’t keep up. Judging by his attitude, we still didn’t spoil him enough. My friend Philip would lavish M&M candies on his bunny, Drusilla. The books on rabbits we’d bought warned us that chocolate was poisonous to them. Drusilla obviously hadn’t bothered to read the literature. Whenever Philip wanted to summon her, he’d shake a bag of M&Ms, and she would come running from whatever corner of his apartment she was holed up in. The only thing that rousted Binky from a hiding place was the descent of a human hand threatening to pet him or pick him up.

  Binky’s breeder, Warren, had handed Linda his business card at the time he had sold Binky to us, inviting her to call him with any problems. It was reassuring that we had an expert on tap, and many were the times that Linda took him up on his offer.