*Sorry about the poor photo quality. It is hard to get an in-focus picture of a moving target with a cell phone camera.
This is Maizie. Maizie is a boy rabbit. However, Maizie spent the first half of his/her life being a girl, until the one day that we saw her/him doing a very unfemale action towards our cat. Yes, our cat.
About 4 years ago we were suckered into buying Maizie from Amish friends of ours with the intention of breeding her and using the rabbits for meat for dog food. Having so many dogs, we thought this was the more sustainable and local thing to do, rather than buy factory farm beef from the grocery store. When we bought Maizie, for the whopping price of $5, plus another $10 for the crate handmade by an 11 year old, I had been a vegetarian for about 10 years. Now take a look at that first picture. I don't know how anyone could think of killing something so cute, let alone a diehard animal lover, so needless to say, Maizie turned into a pet, not a breeder. And since we later found out Maizie was a boy, we really didn't even have a say in the decision!
I love this rabbit. He/she is big, not afraid of anything, and thinks he is a cat. He lives in the laundry room and we normally let him out of his crate in the evening for a couple of hours. He plays with the cats, runs around the cat room, laundry room, and bathroom, and chews on the molding a little. He LOVES the cats, especially Molokai, his best bud. They wrestle, play, bite each other, and run/hop all around. People ask if I worry about the cats hurting him, but it is the other way around. The cats run crying from Maizie.
About 2 weeks ago he stopped eating his hay and alfalfa pellets. I thought this was finally it, so I let him stay out of his crate as much as he wanted and started feeding him tons of organic veggies. I realized a couple days later that Maizie had not been in his crate at all for two days. He drinks out of the cat water bowl, uses their litter boxes, and lays on the carpet all day. Now two weeks later, he seems just as spunky as before and has the run of the area. Talk about living the good life. He gets us to think he is dying so that he never has to go back in his crate and can be a total free range rabbit! I hope he lives long enough so that our daughter grows up thinking that having a rabbit in the bathroom with her is normal. It always makes people jump when Maizie pops out from under the bathtub!