{"id":548,"date":"2009-09-02T13:11:30","date_gmt":"2009-09-02T20:11:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/?p=548"},"modified":"2025-11-07T10:27:29","modified_gmt":"2025-11-07T17:27:29","slug":"childhood-pets-part-three-sheesh-it-never-ends","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/?p=548","title":{"rendered":"Childhood Pets… part three (sheesh it never ends)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Okay so we had cats.\u00a0 And we had chickens.\u00a0 And at one time, during Disney’s run of Charlotte’s Web I had a rat, who I named Templeton.\u00a0 He was a big black and white rat who we kept outside and he was very tame.\u00a0 But he did die, inexplicably, after owning him a couple of months.\u00a0<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

And we had rabbits.\u00a0 At first my brother and I each had a pet rabbit.\u00a0 We cuddled and played with them but after a while they got too big and they were just petted in the cage, fed and watered.\u00a0 Then my mother tried to breed them.\u00a0 She got a breeder box, read up that you had to put the female into the males cage (or the other way… I forget) or the female would fight him, etc.\u00a0 I think she may have had success with my female rabbit Sunflower, so she decided to get a pair of huge meat rabbits.\u00a0\u00a0 And each rabbit has its unique story.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

One day, Sunflower died.\u00a0 While I was crying over the death of my pet (even though I wasn’t particularly attached to her) my mother who was in RN school had gathered my brother, sister and several of the neighbor kids and was using the opportunity to do a little dissection class for them.\u00a0 So\u00a0I was in the house “waaaaaa, Sunflower”\u00a0 while my mother was in the backyard, “Now this is the small intestine.”\u00a0 She drags it up and out the body.\u00a0 “And this is the large intestine… no Erin don’t poke that, it’s the colon.”\u00a0 Gasps and squeals of “ewww” as my sister does just that and the stench of rabbit poop spreads.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

And another day one of our rabbit’s eyes began to bulge in its socket.\u00a0 Penny-Pinching Paul (my father) is SO not going to pay for a vet visit so we speculate as this eye bulge grows that the poor rabit must have a brain tumor.\u00a0 By now my mother is employed as a PNP in a Pediatrician’s office and she brings home some morphine from the office and shoots up the rabbit with enough to take out a dog and gently leaves him in our small patch of grass to die free.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

My brother comes home from school and calls my mom.\u00a0 “Mom, what’d you do to the rabbit?”\u00a0\u00a0 She explains and he laughs.\u00a0<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

“Mom, rabbit ain’t dead.\u00a0 Rabbit is\u00a0STONED, totally stoned..\u00a0 Flying high!”<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Not only did the rabbit live, whatever was bulging his eye disappeared.\u00a0 Although after that he did have a crazy habit of running around his cage so fast he would run up the sides for a full circle.\u00a0 Mother could only assume someone at the office had tampered with the morphine.\u00a0 Us kids just assumed she had accidentally discovered a cure for cancer.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

The last rabbit story is the tale of the Baby Bunnies.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

My mother finally successfully bread the big white meat rabbits.\u00a0 So while I was in high school we had 6 of the cutest little baby rabbits and we would visit the and cuddle them every day.\u00a0 Ezzy and her yearly kittens had died and we missed the cuddly baby stuff.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Then one day we came home from school and the baby bunnies were gone.\u00a0 We queried my mother who informed us she took them to the butcher because she wasn’t raising ‘cute’ rabbits she was raising MEAT rabbits.\u00a0 <\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Oh we soooo harassed her about that.\u00a0 <\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Two weeks later we have fried chicken.\u00a0 My brother says, “Mom, this is funny tasting chicken.”<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

She replies, “That’s because its rabbit.”<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

And we all know what she means, its the baby bunnies.\u00a0 My sister runs screaming from the room.\u00a0 My brother announces to my mother, “your sick” and leaves the table.\u00a0 <\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

And me.\u00a0 Well, I continue eating after I tell her,\u00a0 “Tastes a lot like chicken.”<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Okay so we had cats.\u00a0 And we had chickens.\u00a0 And at one time, during Disney’s run of Charlotte’s Web I had a rat, who I named Templeton.\u00a0 He was a big black and white rat who we kept outside and … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-just-ramblings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=548"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":594,"href":"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548\/revisions\/594"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}