Yard Art: A Story Without a Point

Sometimes nature is just not on an animal's side.

Am I now going to launch into a tyrade against my defective genes/my inhereted (BRCA) gene mutation responsible for the massive tumor that grew across my chest throughout my 20's?

No. I'm going to talk about bunnies. Again.



How I wish I had a picture to share with you.
I nearly recreated everything just to show you;
except we now live 2200 miles from that yard.
But you can imagine something akin to this.

It has been my experience that mother bunnies don’t canvas an area very well before stowing their babies. We once found a little burrow of baby bunnies right smack in the middle of our lawn. No trees around, no logs, no rocks, just right there in the open - in the middle of a grassy yard. Oh, and a yard that housed two rambunctious, large dogs.

In spite of Mother Bunny’s stupidity (we probably would have been doing Mother Nature a favor by letting this creatures’ offspring die), we felt the need to protect these innocent, furry little lives.

We were afraid to move them, in case this fantastic specimen of a parent would then either abandon or not be able to find them. But we couldn't keep our dogs inside the house for the next however long until the bunnies grew up and left the nest. What to do?

Well, we took near bouts everything we had in the yard and garage and built a sort of cage around the burrow. Lawn chairs, bistro tables, rakes, all manner of yard fare was piled in an encapsulating circle of fantastic yard art. It was a tottering tower of protection. A staggering statue of ingenuity. A fanciful fortress of fortification… Okay I’m done. It was cool. In a hillbilly sort of outlandishly strange creation.

We thought it would keep the dogs away during the day, and then at night when they were in the house, Mother Bunny could make her way in to her babies. Our poor dogs spent hours pacing around that pile, sniffing, barking, digging. Actually, it was probably good for them – added some excitement to their meaningless, uneventful day. 

Eventually though, in spite of our best efforts, the dogs made a way in and killed all of the fuzzy little babies. Our lawn was a mortuary of tiny, dead rabbit carcasses splayed across it. Our efforts toward protecting them were for naught.

Sometimes nature is just on an animal's side (i.e. the dogs').

If this was a sermon or a story with any kind of larger point, this would be where I make it. Maybe something about the truimph in persistance, go dogs, or the futility of failed efforts, no matter how grand. Because yes, our mound was grand. 

But it’s not. (A story with a point, that is.) I just wanted to tell you something I recalled the other day that makes me laugh - not the part where the bunnies die, of course, the part where our furniture and tools are piled in a mound on our lawn.

Plus, well, I thought I could use some animal redemption points given that I recently wrote about the pointlessness of bunny ownership. I mean, we did try to save them and all. I can’t help it that every last one of them was ferociously killed by my dogs.

This story really didn’t really help my animal cred, did it?