Country life
Life isn't sweet
Leanda de Lisle
AI've said before, there is something of the big cat about our brown labrador and recently he's taken to playing with his prey. He dug up a rabbit's warren while Peter and I were away and the children found him torturing the babies he found. My eldest boy dispatched a badly injured bunny with his air-rifle and his younger brothers brought the remaining rabbits into the house. They were told it would be best to knock their heads against a wall, but the children wouldn't have it, and so they were put back in a rabbit hole and left, very probably, to starve.
I wish we didn't have so many rabbits, but looking through my window here in the library, I saw Pepsi kill another one today. He looked so horribly pleased with himself that I actually felt cross with him. Poor dog, he could never possibly understand our rather confused attitude to vermin. One minute we are gassing rabbits, the next we are rescuing them — or even buy- ing them as pets. We still have the Rabbit in the Iron Mask. He's the psychotic Netherlands Dwarf rabbit who lives, if not actually in a mask, then in a half-forgotten prison near the chickens.
I've been tempted to release this pet rab- bit into the wild, but I'm told that would be cruel. I don't know why. Yes, he would die and possibly quickly, but life doesn't look that sweet for wild rabbits from where I'm sitting — and at least he would taste free- dom. But I'll probably be Mrs Goody Two Shoes and take him back to the shop instead. I may send the new hamster Trig- ger with him. Trigger was a present from rn Y mother-in-law to my middle son, Chris- tian, who seems to get all the pets. She's chestnut with white markings, like her namesake, and very pretty. Unfortunately, she's even worse tempered than the rabbit. Have you ever heard a hamster growl? Believe you me, it chills the blood. Our nanny says that Trigger was too old to become a child's pet and obviously wasn't handled properly when she was young. Whatever the reason for her unfriendly dis- Position she's got to go, or so I said until something very strange happened. Yester- day morning we discovered that Trigger had vanished from her cage. The lid belonging to the blue room on the third floor of her hamster home was off and sus- picion centred on Christian. He sleepwalks nearly every night, as he has done since he was a baby, and the nanny says she heard him going into the nursery where the ham- ster is kept the night before.
The theory went that Christian got up in the night to play with Trigger. She escaped and Christian went back to bed and forgot all about it. Questions were asked about Christian's sanity, and not for the first time. I'm concerned, about the sleepwalking, of course.
Not to mention the nightmares. I asked his godmother, who is a consultant psychia- trist, to find out what she could about sleepwalking and night-terrors a month ago. Unfortunately, she hasn't got back to me yet. But my view is that Christian is simply more sensitive and imaginative than the average child. He'll probably be a great artist when he grows up. In the meantime, he has been damned as a murderer by his brothers who told him he should never be allowed to keep a pet again.
This morning Trigger was found back in her cage. I think that after having a nice run around the house, leaving mouse-like droppings wherever she went, she came back to the nursery to eat. Her food was by her cage, she took some and snuggled into her bedding to eat it. One plastic roof was slightly askew — surely her way in. The nanny claims that my theory is way off. The lids were all on last night, she says. In her view Christian went on some kind of noc- turnal mouse-hunt, captured Trigger and put her back in her cage. Whatever the truth, Trigger was lucky not to have been found by Pepsi. Last week he was seen swallowing a mouse whole. This big cat thing is getting quite out of control.
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