Lost rabbits and a dilemma about parenting

 We recently moved house and, in the space of a week, managed to lose our two guinea pigs and rabbit.  If you follow me on Facebook you may remember me scrambling around the garden to save one of these animals from a fox only a few months back.  The guinea pigs were the first to go.  Unused to having a lawn (our previous house had decking and a patio) we left the rabbit and guinea pigs in the run overnight.  The next morning, the rabbit was still there but the guinea pigs were gone.  The gashes in the grass led us to believe that the rabbit had dug a hole just deep enough to let the guinea pigs escape. Given that guinea pigs run more or less aimlessly when released from the hutch, we were under no illusions that they’d come back. 

We started being more careful with the rabbit after that, keeping him in his hutch rather than letting him run around the garden.  But he stopped eating and started to shed fur.  Whether this was from boredom or loneliness, we decided that pending the purchase of new companion guinea pigs, we had to let him roam around the garden, making sure to return him to his hutch at night time.  But the rabbit was hard to catch and impossible to retrieve when he hid in small, dark places.  One evening he escaped and hid under the shed.  We weren’t too worried about leaving him – this had happened before and he always emerged in the morning.  But in middle of the night we heard noises – some kind of screaming – from the garden.  I couldn’t really get back to sleep, and in the morning the rabbit was gone.  Only a few traces of fur were left in the grass.

I felt guilty about the guinea pigs (although the kids accepted their loss quite calmly) but we were all upset about the rabbit.  I looked for him in the garden for the next couple of days.  My four year old came home upset, having thought to pick dandelion leaves for him, then remembering he was gone.  I had a similar moment this morning when I cut the dry end off a cucumber I found in the fridge.

While I know this is trivial – animals die all the time – I’ve found the guilt surprisingly difficult.  I was responsible for a domestic animal who couldn’t look after himself in the wild, and allowed him to come to harm.  My wife (more upset than me – it was really her rabbit) said that’s just how it goes.  Animals are not objects, you can’t control them and you can only look after them while they’re with you.  Keeping a depressed rabbit cooped up in a hutch or run would have been the only other solution – and obviously no solution at all. 

I’m not sure I agree – there were other precautions we could have taken – but ultimately I accept that there’s a trade-off here: control and safety versus freedom and danger.  And the strength of my feelings shows that this applies not only to rabbits, but also in a more profound way, to parenting and our relationship with our children.  (Incidentally, I just finished re-reading Haruki Murukami’s Wind-up Bird Chronicle in which the disappearance of the narrator’s cat prefigures the surreal and unexplained disappearance of his wife). 

I let my kids do things (climb high trees for example) that I know make other parents quail.  I have a strong belief in letting children become independent and self-reliant, even if that sometimes means they face setbacks, get stuck or hurt themselves.  I focus on this belief as an antidote to my other tendency to protect and control.  But how would I feel if the independence I give one day confirmed my deep-seated fears by leading to real harm?

So an incident with rodents (and a leporid) has awoken existential angst about parenting which I don’t know how to solve.  In the meantime, we’re thinking about getting a cat.  You do have to let them out, but I think I’ll feel safer with a carnivore that can jump onto rooftops.