Tony Deyal | What's up, Doc?

Now that my two younger children have flown the coop, one of them, my daughter Jasmine, thought it would do her mother good to have a pet for compensation and to worry over, not thinking really that it was not a case of 'either/or' but 'and'.

While Alfred Lord Tennyson was convinced that "the egg must break for the bird to fly", he did not appreciate that parents become even more concerned when the bird starts flying and many times wish it had remained in the relative safety of the nest than venture out into the wild, blue yonder with eagles and such like. In fact, you have to watch them, especially your girls, like hawks, knowing that hawks are doing the same thing.

Jasmine's mother, my wife Indranie, is an animal and baby magnet. Bad dogs pass her straight and attack me. Wherever we have lived - Antigua, Barbados, Belize or Trinidad - birds come knocking on our window reminding her that it is time to put out their food for them. Every day she takes ever-increasing quantities of bread, birdseed, bananas and sugar-water outside to feed the growing numbers of birds of many species and tastes who, she constantly reminds me, don't get enough to eat in the city suburbs.

Babies leave their parents without a look-back and reach for Indranie. Me, they generally need time to stop crying first before they begin to appreciate my hearty laugh and the snatches of song that form my repertoire of suitable lyrics for children.

Jasmine is soft-hearted and agonises a lot over stuff that I, having grown up with slingshot, air rifle and my father's 16-gauge shotgun, did not think about until I became much older. It is not that I do not like animals - we always had dogs, cats and cattle around when I was small.

My aunt and, later, my mother reared poultry, and Tennyson would not have enjoyed my pragmatic variation of his famous saying. My version was, "The shell must break for the egg to fry." My grandfather gave me an agouti, my cousin Ralph a moulting bullfinch, and my father a baby goat, just a kid really.

It was when they decided to convert my pet into Christmas lunch for the family that I cried for hours and perhaps steered clear of that deep attachment to creatures destined for the pot. I had rabbit once when I was seven and have never eaten it since.

 

Greater worry

 

Now in the approaching winter of my years, I've had to contend with two little dogs, Missy and Sheba, and two children who might be partially out of the nest, but, as I know from long experience, there is a symbiotic relationship between children and worry. The bigger the kids get, the greater the worry and the larger the problems.

To get back to Tennyson, though, and perhaps at him, one of our 'birds', Zubin, who is in Barbados and occasionally visits, has got his licence and, while I acknowledge that the shell must break for the bird to drive, the nerves are a different story and act up a lot when the child takes the car and goes out at night. It is enough to drive parents round the Benz.

Jasmine went past and then into a pet shop near the university and saw a thin, half-starved baby rabbit, all white, furry and seemingly frightened, and bought it for her mom. This is how, having refused Minoxidil, wigs and toupees and other hair-raising adventures, I ended up in a hare-raising one that left me unable to watch the World Cup football and England vs Australia one-day international cricket for three very long days.

Rabbits have slightly red, big, sorrowful eyes that are relatively huge and extremely appealing when they are small. My wife, a kind of female Gerald Durrell, with her love for animals apparent to all, especially the creatures in question, is a soft touch and pushover. I was recruited to come up with a name and pulled one out of a hat, so to speak.

An exploration, grope really, into the lower regions of the animal by Indranie elicited the information that we had a female bunny on our hands and hence the unisexual moniker 'Bugsy' was chosen. Jasmine bought pellets and eventually the animal liberally sprinkled the box in which she was initially housed, the rug and floor with her own inevitable contribution, given the amount of greenery she consumed. In the meantime, Missy looked through the locked glass door licking her lips.

At first, I limited my comments to "What's up, doc?" whenever Bugsy, first thinking and then climbing out of the box, entered my domain - the living room where, like now, I sit with my coffee, cricket or football, novel or column.

I cracked some rabbit jokes when Indranie and Jasmine were around, like what do rabbits say before they eat? Lettuce pray. What do you call 99 rabbits stepping backwards? A receding hare line. I noticed that Bugsy would dive under the large, flat wooden cupboard that is the stand on which the TV sits. I had read that rabbits are attracted to electric wires because of the sound but did not appreciate the damage that the teeth of even the smallest bunny can do until, without any warning, my Internet and with it, my television, went.

You can call it a bad hare day, but, as the Digicel technicians explained, the fibre-optic cable emits light that we don't really see, and that as well as the casing are attractive to animals, especially rabbits.

I had read about it even before the bunny bit the wire, but foolishly did not think it would happen with such rapidity. Now we have to keep Bugsy in a separate area away from the living room where we have erected a barricade. Whenever I see her, I do an Elmer Fudd and exclaim meaningfully, "That dwatted wabbit!"

- Tony Deyal was last seen asking why rabbits like to spend The Weeknd and Future with Drake, Kendrick Lamar and Bruno Mars? They love hip hop.