The Rabbit Hypnotist

This is Alasdair, the head hypnotist at Broadleys Veterinary Hospital. He also happens to be the head surgeon, but it’s his shamanic skills that impress me the most. Like Gillian the Bird Nerd, who captures wild birds with her bare hands, he has this notion that he is not a wizard – but as you can see, he clearly is one.

The entranced Broccles in the crook of his arm is a rabbit of a few strong opinions. One must not pick him up. One must not touch his mouth or legs. One must not prod him with instruments or stabbity needles. As long as one follows these simple rules, he is a perfectly unfrenzied ball of non-fury.

For whatever reason (probably involving witchcraft), the vets and nurses of Broadleys can convince him to go along with all the sorts of things he normally disapproves of. Alasdair is the king of coercion, thanks to his hypnotic approach. He picks up Broccles, flips him onto his back and then sits there, stroking his forehead until that excitable rabbit nose stops twitching. At this point, Broccles will remain motionless while Alasdair presses his bad eye, feels his guts, sticks endoscopes into various orifices, shaves his leg or ear, inserts needles, and draws blood. Once he’s done, Alasdair flips him back onto his front and pets him. Broccles spreads out under Alasdair’s hand like he does at home when he feels relaxed and sleepy.

Chillin’ at home

Broccles is one of those incident-prone pets who always seem to be in and out of the vet hospital. Recently one of his back teeth grew all misshapen and gave him a tongue abscess. Then his tearduct got blocked and his blind eye got infected. Then we feared a kidney infection. It now looks like he will need to have his blind eye surgically removed by one of the Broadleys wizards.

Here he is bandaged up after Alasdair extracted blood from his ear this week. As soon as he got home, he went back to investigating ways of reaching Bunty’s herbage. Bunty has had to place his fruit, flowers and vegetables on higher and higher levels over the course of the summer. Several of his plants are on the roof, thanks to Broccles. That rabbit is fond of his Sky Cabbage and Sky Strawberries, and he brooks no argument – except when he’s being hypnotised.

I once asked Alasdair what his secret is. He was amused that I thought he had a secret. (Like I said, he is oblivious to the fact that he’s a shaman.) He replied: “I think it’s just a case of taking your time and not rushing it.”

He lies the rabbit along his forearm, with its head tilted slightly downwards, then gently strokes its forehead. “It helps if your forearm is the same length as a rabbit,” he observed.

I noticed that he has a very calm and low-pitched way of speaking around rabbits too. Nothing sudden, nothing loud. He sounds like my yoga teacher when she’s getting us to drift into meditation.

He makes rabbit hynotism seem like something any muggle could do. But it’s not true. I’ve tried it. Broccles was immediately beside himself with indignation. There was no option of “taking my time” about it. He kicked his way out of my arms and stamped every square foot of the living room floor, before retreating under the TV table to sulk. It appears that only wizards can hypnotise rabbits.

First Tick of the Season

Probably the only tick of the season. The last one I saw in Scotland was about four years ago, under embarrassing circumstances. My new boyfriend Bunty had taken me into the bonny Highlands to meet his mother, who lives in a beautiful wilderness, with numerous animals running freely around her cottage. She is generally in tune with nature. I was keen to impress her.

Her dog Pipkin liked me, which was a good start. I found a tick on Pipkin’s neck, and proudly identified it.

“A tick!” I said.

Bunty’s mother remarked that she has great trouble removing ticks, because it’s so hard to do without leaving the head in, which then gets infected.

“Ah!” I said. “I’m great at removing ticks.”

I told her about the pack of feral dogs I ran around with as a child in Greece, and about the enormous juicy ticks they would pick up from the marsh grass. I said I’d learned a foolproof technique from the locals for removing them, and I was well-practised. You twist it slowly clockwise, then quickly anticlockwise with an upward yank, and presto!

“I’ll remove it for you,” I declared, and before Bunty’s mother could stop me, I had grasped it and twisted its head off.

There was a long, difficult silence. Bunty’s mother was none too pleased. The subject of ticks has not been raised between us since. Unlike me, Pipkin survived her tick ordeal without any trauma at all.

This year’s tick was on the neck of our rabbit Broccles. It attached itself a few days ago, but after the Pipkin incident, I was leery of applying the Foolproof Technique. I googled for alternative Foolproof Techniques, and found an implement called a Tick Twister, which is allegedly the most Foolproof of tick devices out there. It arrived in the post today.

The trick is to slide the prongs under the tick, each side of its head, and then keep twisting till it lets go. This tick had got so fat on Broccles’s blood that I could barely wedge the thing under it, but in the end it was jammed in and I twisted the handle. Out came the tick, head and all – bish, bash, bosh. Tick Twister 1, Foolproof Technique 0. Broccles did a little frolic.

I have an exam in two days. It could be argued that I should be studying instead of writing blog entries about ticks. Then again, it could be argued that this counts as revision,* since my exam is on animal physiology, and I will need to use my knowledge of ticks in it. Here are some things I will need to know.

• A tick has turquoise blood. Red blood takes its colour from the iron used to transport oxygen, but a tick’s blood uses copper, and so its blood is turquoise.
• A tick has no veins in its body – instead, the turquoise blood washes freely around its organs. Even so, it possesses a heart.
• A tick breathes through holes in its sides. The air passes through structures like bound pages, called book lungs. Covering a tick with Vaseline, as some people do, kills it very slowly by suffocation.
• When a tick dies, the extensor muscles within its exoskeleton relax: it hugs itself.

I didn’t want to feel responsible for the tick’s death. Nor did I want it crawling back over the garden wall to attach itself to our pets again. To resolve this dilemma, I carried it into the field across the main road and released it among the grasses, where it hunkered down among the roots to digest its meal. There’s no way it will cross that road. It’s foolproof.

*Revision – UK term for exam preparation.

Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit

In the UK, if your first words on the first day of a month are “rabbit, rabbit, rabbit”, you will have good luck for the rest of the month. The first day of March is especially rabbity for me, because it is Harvey the Rabbit’s birthday. That is to say, when we adopted his playful self from the unwanted pets place, nobody could tell us his real birthday, and so I chose today to be it.

I picked Saint David’s Day for him because he liked Daffodils. Saint David is the patron saint of Wales, where I was born, and it is celebrated by the wearing of a daffodil on one’s lapel.

Now daffodils are pushing up through the soil on Harvey’s grave, and I am spending today thinking about his enormous personality. A friend once called him a “bounder”, and that’s exactly what he was: the most opinionated pet I ever had. One day he threw a tantrum because I had put his litter tray back the wrong way round. He liked to chase balls, and he loved to chase cats. He slept with me on the bed at night, until one night he took umbrage at the fact that Bunty was taking up too much room, and so peed on his head. He took great delight in climbing impossible things, and bouncing on the inflatable airbed. He ate daffodils.

This whole blog is dedicated to Harvey. I began it a few weeks after he was run over on the road outside our cottage.  It was a way to remind myself of the many great things in my life, and of how breathtaking is the place where I have made my home. I no longer need reminding of these things, but thanks to my love for Harvey, I have come to enjoy this excuse to look around at my world and feel awed.

Summer view from our front door