16/90, sexing a rabbit

No, you're not missing something. Post 15/90 happened here. And I'm days behind. Two days, to be exact. But here is the first go at catching up:

One of the first things that happens each time I make a trip back to Ohio is a family gathering around my rabbit's cage. Baby, a Netherlands dwarf, is white with gray spots and more loved than she can handle.

She does not like to be held. She occasionally growls and charges at your hand when you give her a handful of hay. More upsetting than her inability to show affection is her sudden interest in the teddy bear that sits on my bed, the stuffed animal Joe got me for our first Valentine's Day.

When I let her out of her cage to romp around the room for an hour or two each day, she bolts straight for my bed, leaps onto it and begins nuzzling into the covers. On a good day, she'll lay down next to me while I read. On most days, she tries to chew my book out of my hands.

Sitting at my desk one day, I noticed that she was prancing around the bear, nipping at him, pushing him along the comforter. And then there was a horrible smell. And then there was Baby mounting the teddy bear.

I dove at the bed, and she leaped away, jumping off of the bed and hiding in the closet. I was stunned. Baby was a girl. She had to be a girl.

This would not be the first time the pet store got it wrong. When my parents bought her, the woman assured them that she was a tiny, baby girl bunny. The store had also assured my parents that their guinea pig was a girl. This later resulted in a name change.


When I got home this weekend and I sat with my mom and sister in front of Baby's cage, watching her try to chew her way through the bars to get to us, I told them the story. She is nearly a year old, so it made sense to me that she was "mature." My mom agreed, and then asked what I'd been fearing.

"You're sure she's a girl?"

Well, no, not exactly. Not sure as in I'd checked. Not sure as in she showed definite, human-like traits that let me know she preferred dolls to Tonka trucks. I just felt it. She had to be.

My mom insisted that we sex the rabbit, to which I could only reply, "What?" This is what they call it, she said. You flip it over to check, you determine the sex of the rabbit: you sex the rabbit.

My mind flipped through all of the times I'd tried to hold and cuddle Baby, the scars and claw marks and bleeding slices across arms and chest. I wasn't so sure about this. I wasn't so sure I wanted to check, either. What would I do if my baby wasn't my little girl anymore? It took women hundreds of years to have their sex drive acknowledged. Why couldn't my baby just be, you know, testing the water, experimenting, figuring herself out?

We opened the cage door and let Baby hop out onto the carpet. Before she could get one lap around the room, I had grabbed her in an arcing swoop and flipped her over. It's true, what they say about rabbits. Get them on their back (if you can) and they're stunned. They just sit there, wide-eyed, ears back. I thought about how many guys had said this about how many women.

Her teats were bright pink against her white, white belly. I knew this meant nothing; the guinea pig had them, too--useless but there.

Mom tugged her little feet and saw nothing incriminating. "She's a girl."