Attack rabbit

Run away! Run away!

From the Dowgiac (Michigan) Daily News, here's yet another story about our four-footed companions in the garden. The writer is their gardening columnist Nancy Wiersma. The relevant excerpt:

As I was coming around the back corner of my home I startled a shabby, large, brown rabbit.

It ran under the cover of one of my spireas.

From deep under the shelter of a few low-lying branches I suppose it felt comforted and safe.

As I stood looking down at it through the foliage, I threw up my hands and tried to scare it away.

It promptly reared up on its hind legs, like it was begging.

Au contraire, my dear gardening friends, this hostile brute was not begging.

It was being aggressive, confrontational and even hostile.

It was challenging me, with its back squared up against the twiggy base of the shrub.

As it was rearing up and down, it also had the nerve to be stamping its feet at me.

And to add the icing on the cake, it had to bully me by huffing and hissing while it was doing the stamping.

Well, I tried several times to run this testy brute off, but each time it only huffed, hissed and stamped harder.

This creature was fearsome and scary.

And then she gives a list of preventative (and mild-mannerered) tactics that might deter future visitations. But I gotta say, this is a new one on me. Don't we think of rabbits as symbols of timidity? Guess not. The wisdom of Monty Python: reaching even into my gardening practice.

Comments

[Frances]

Wasn't it Jimmy Carter who had the run in with the killer rabbit?

[beachcomber]

I was thinking the same thing. We've been having a giggle over that for a number of years. Maybe he wasn't drunk afterall...

[sandra]

Well if I met a human in MY garden, I would stamp and hiss too. After all, along with the camomile tea, I got told the story of Peter Rabbit. And not the bowlerized Disney version either.

[Common Weeder]

I don't suppose we can think that Nancy was having a little fun with us?

[eliz]

I think she's serious, and aggressive behavior in a rabbit seems not totally unbelievable.

However, she has an unusual style for a gardening columnist and elsewhere in the column mentions other anecdotes that were not believed by her readers.

[Pam/Digging]

This brings to mind the rabbit battle scenes from "Watership Down."