A Portrait of J. Alfred Fluffernut

This is a portrait of J. Alfred Fluffernut, our second rabbit.

A majestic beast.

We adopted him from a shelter on Long Island after he got along very well with Gorie when we brought her there for a "date". His name was "Gabriele" there, which you may note is a stupid cross between "Gabriel" and "Gabrielle", and was rightfully changed. He was abandoned at the shelter after Hurricane Sandy, along with another rabbit called Canterfloss that wasn't adoptable because he had humped her into a catatonic state. After her experience with him, she refused to be in a room with male rabbits that weren't old and decrepit enough that she could possibly take them in a fight. That is not a joke, get your animals fucking spayed and neutered, bitches!

Thankfully, the shelter had neutered him before throwing him in with Gorie, and it was love at first sight. He does still nip her in the butt every once in a while to get her to run around and play with him, but he doesn't terrorize her like he did poor Canterfloss. (Who is doing well in a foster home, so I've heard. But that might just be shelter people's way of saying she "lives on a farm, now..." But no. She's doing great. Again, spay and neuter your animals.) Sometimes, though, when we're trying to get him to make friends with our new bunny, Ivy, while she's sitting in a corner terrified of these new rabbits in this strange new place, he'll go up and nip her right in the face like a fucking idiot. He wants to play, and he doesn't have the social grace enough to realize that maybe he should just focus on sitting and staring for a while, like a normal goddamn rabbit.

He's a lionhead/angora mix, which for those few of you who are not familiar with rabbit breeds means he looks ridiculous. Lionheads are so-called because they have tiny little manes of fur around their neck and ears, and angoras have luxurious, long coats that make them look like silky mops or those silly little show-dogs. Alfie is a mix, meaning he has a sort of silky rockstar mane and a line of long fur around his butt like a tutu.

Alfie, working it despite being fucking bummed at the shelter. ADOPT!

Gorie, our first rabbit, is a really beautiful rabbit with a short, sleek, subtly graded coat that goes from gray to tan with adorable white spots around her bright eyes and on her little waggily tail, and Alfie literally looks like a crazy-eyed alien baby. He barely even looks like a rabbit, and if he does, he's either a drunk hobo rabbit or a scarecrow. For rabbits. His nose is all squashed and his matted fur (which is incredibly long because he’s an inbred disaster of an attempt to breed tiny long-haired rabbits) tangles around his little grumpy-old-man mouth because his eyes are constantly tearing and streaming down his face-fur. He’s basically white with a confusing grey alien crop circle on his butt, with dark brown ears and legs that are too tiny so that when he hops around he looks like a furry little chicken nugget. He puts his two front paws too close together when he sits, so he slowly begins to lean to one side sometimes when he loses his balance. He makes a weird little noise when he drinks water (and he drinks so much water) that might be a little satisfied grunt or might be the sound water makes when it travels through such a weird little snout.

Loves water and laying eggs for Easter, in that order. Go ahead and try to make the point that males don't lay eggs.  

He has an incurable chronically leaking eye. There's a sciencey name for it, but suffice it to say that he cries sticky little tears out of this one eye near constantly. The only way we can get Gorie, his bunny buddy, to groom his eye and keep the tears from getting matted up in his long freaking fur (and yes, that means she licks away the sticky gross tears, and yes rabbits are absolutely disgusting) is by cutting it really short so she doesn't have trouble, so that his thick fur looks more like a lamb's wool, and in fact with his funny ears and weird little face he looks almost just like a lamb when his hair is short. There aren't any reasonable groomers that cut rabbit hair (for good reason), and so we have to do it ourselves, and we are terrible at it. It looks absolutely awful, but the up side is that he manages to be even cuter when he's running around with an absolutely ugly freaking haircut. Part of that is because he loves being free from the binds of his long hair, and he runs around like a little maniac and shakes his butt in the air out of pure bunny joy, which is better and cuter than regular joy.

Some of the fur around his eyes has been naturally groomed off (because he leaks), and he never had the pretty dark eyelashes that our other bunnies have that give them that sort of half-eyelid look, so the end result is that he looks constantly super nervous about being a rabbit. The whites of his eyes show sometimes, which is unusual for a rabbit unless they're very stressed, but it's just another by-product of having gross leaky tear ducts. He's also naturally a little bit of a nervous nelly, pricking his head up at the sound of literally anything at all, and so his mannerisms are constantly a little ridiculous-looking, especially when you couple that with his ridiculously tiny legs, a result of rabbit inbreeding.

He has a skinny little body frame (mostly because Gorie steals all his treats) but has a fat little rabbit butt, so when you pick him up he feels like a baby: delicate, but bottom-heavy. He has a nervous nose-- all rabbits' noses work constantly, but his is a little quicker than usual. He also has a habit of taking a huge pieces of parsley (his favorite) and pulling it up towards the ceiling, nearly doing a backflip trying to eat the entire thing in one munch.

He sneezes constantly. Part of the problem is his clogged sinuses (again from the leaky eyes), and part of the problem is that he's a little bit allergic to the dust in hay. Rabbits need to have a constant source of hay, so the solution is that Alfie sneezes like a maniac, all the time. If you've never heard a bunny sneeze, it truly makes your heart grow three sizes, trust me.

So basically we have this crazy-eyed little hobo-monster running around all the time and sneezing like a cartoon character, next to our beautiful, stoic, hare-like field rabbit. And he is devoted to her. He follows her around constantly, flopping down next to her whenever she sits down. Gorie is a real licker, she gives constant, constant kisses. Sometimes when you pet her she licks the floor, out of habit and because she can't reach your hand. Alfie never really got the hang of grooming Gorie, and he never really licked us at all, and we figured out why recently.

Every once in a while when we came home, Gorie would have a ridiculous little wet spot right in the middle of her forehead where her fur was all matted and poking up like a mohawk. We thought maybe she was dunking her head in the water bowl or something, until we started seeing her with little weird spots like this on her back and butt. Then we saw it in action: Alfie was grooming her, and he was freaking terrible at it. He's like a bad kisser: earnestly going at it while Gorie waits patiently for him to be done, rolling her little bunny eyes.

The other day, I was laying on the floor and cuddling Alfie a bit. Suddenly he sat up, and started anxiously sniffing around my ear. I felt a single, solitary lick on the middle ridge of my ear, and then he immediately pranced away to hide. I'm not ashamed to say that I was very moved. My little monster finally trusted me enough to give me a single terrible kiss.

If you enjoyed this bunny-related material and would like to learn more about bunnies and bunny-goings-on, I'm writing a new blog about rabbit maintenance: No Fears, Rabbit Ears

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