My first angora was in a hutch in our small back garden. I got him for myself but my sons loved him, too.
We had a neighbour who was an old Irish alcoholic, who was a total nuisance getting drunk all day and singing and swearing day and night, his house full of random tramps. Another neighbour told us he once got it in his head to keep and breed dogs, and kept them locked in a shed. They all got distemper and had to be put down.
One day we saw him and one of his little mates leaning out the back window and they looked like they were staring at our bunny. I thought nothing of it. They were weird at the best of times. A day or two later, I looked out in the afternoon to check bunny was OK and.., his hutch door hung open and he was gone. Just vanished. I had not long been out there with him and knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, I had shot the bolt safely. It was a tiny enclosed garden so nowhere bun could have gone in such a short time since I had been out there with him, had the hutch been left unlocked... Which I knew it hadn't... He would just be on the lawn or somewhere really obvious.
Our garden had a back wall that was fifty foot high as it backed onto a market building. And mid terrace, by a high st... Very hard for anyone to get over what must have been fifty fences to get to our garden. We knew damn well that neighbour took bunny and I still can't bear to think what happened to him in the end. Police wouldn't even have come out, we knew it, as we had called them a hundred times and they said unless he was in the street brandishing a knife at passerby, nothing they could do.
They probably sold him to someone down the pub for a tenner. I never kept rabbits again whilst we lived in that city. Now I am out in the countryside. And can have them again.
poor animals
