RIP Chloe

Chloe was put to sleep late on Sunday night, after a short illness.

We adopted Chloe from the Oxfordshire Animal Sanctuary in 2022, with the intention of her being a companion rabbit to our rabbit Cassius (formerly Aragorn). Cassius had also come to us from the OAS in 2020 as part of a bonded trio with two female rabbits, Taylor and Arya, both of whom he has now substantially outlived.

“Bonding” of Chloe and Cassius initially appeared to have been successful, but rather rapidly came unstuck, as related here.

I had wanted us to return Chloe to the OAS and possibly look out for another companion for Cassius, but Ruth developed a fondness for her and went off this idea. As we (I, certainly) never wanted to risk putting them back together, this obliged us to a) set up two separate sets of rabbit living quarters, and b) ensure that the two were kept apart. The first has taken up space in the house that we could ill afford; the second has caused constant low-level worry that I might leave a door open that would result in Cassius hopping into Chloe’s proximity. For the subsequent c. two and a half years since we adopted her, therefore, Chloe had occupied the cupboard in the dining room that had been the quarters of all our previous rabbits, and Cassius has occupied the second bedroom upstairs, which is the room that I generally work in. The latter is not quite as bad as it sounds, as Cassius had developed a fondness for this room before we adopted Chloe, in much the same way that Harley had a fondness for being under the bed in the master bedroom. However, it would really have been preferable to allow Cassius to keep his ground floor quarters and its access to the garden – but I did not want to look at Chloe all day and we couldn’t come up with what else to do with her.

Chloe never ventured far from her home quarters until, perversely, the last month or so of her life, when she suddenly developed a fondness for hopping out into the garden and sitting behind the hostas (and eating the sage).

Over the last two months, Chloe had only eaten patchily and had lost a large amount of weight. We took her a few times to see Sarah Moffat at Cherry Orchard Vets, who did a blood test and suggested that it could be liver failure. Despite losing even more weight, Chloe continued to seem reasonably perky, but things went downhill a lot over the last week or so, with the result that Ruth called the out of hours number on Sunday night and we ferried her over to the Vets Now Emergency Care service that operates out of Castle Vets on Tilehurst Road, where the on-duty vet recommended euthanasia. Ruth managed to find a space in the garden to bury Chloe, so she’s now interred next to the dogwood plant by the garage.

Ruth admired Chloe for her strong, wild rabbit-adjacent looks; I sort of saw what she meant, and agree re the overbreeding of domestic rabbits that can result in snub faces, but my attitude to Chloe was always tainted by her aggression towards Cassius and the general inconvenience that resulted. It might have been different if we'd had the space to create a home setup where the two could have been kept in neighbouring enclosures and let out separately, but we just didn't have the space for that.

 

Chloe, large brown rabbit, born 2015, died 2025.

Chloe: part deux

I spoke too soon. Barely two days after the previous post, Chloe inflicted a significant wound to one of Cassius’ back legs, and he was duly taken to the vet for an expensive stitch-up. He came through that fine but was sent home with medication to be applied and with various follow up appointments, all of which was made more awkward as we were due to be setting off on holiday to Pembrokeshire the following Saturday. We had already booked both Cassius and Chloe into ‘Reggie's Retreat’, a small animal boarding facility in Bracknell recommended by someone in a local Facebook group. Ruth had to contact them to ask if the two could be housed separately, and whether the proprietor Sophie would very much mind administering Cassius’ medication and taking him for a follow up vet appointment the following week. We weren’t at all sure she’d agree to this, but she turned out to be a star, taking him to his vet appointment and phoning through updates to our holiday rental.

Cassius’ leg wound became infected and we weren’t at all sure he’d pull through, but at the time of writing he does seem to have made a full recovery, though the fur hasn’t grown back yet. We kept him caged for a week or so after we returned from holiday, partly to protect him from Chloe and partly to make it easier for Ruth to catch him in order to medicate him. Since being released from confinement, he has been housed in our second bedroom/my office, where he spends a lot of time anyway snoozing at my feet under the desk. Ruth was concerned about muscle atrophy, but he was back almost immediately to jumping onto the footstool and chair in my office, and generally running about. He is an accomplished jumper, certainly given his age, and I realized that he’s able to use the tub chair in the first picture as a launchpad to get onto my desk, so have been having to place barriers in the way of him doing this.

Cassius exploring after his release

Taking the exploring a bit too far

Ruth did phone the Oxfordshire Animal Sanctuary to tell them that the bonding had broken down somewhat, and had what seems to have been a fairly ill-tempered conversation with Laura, who (according to Ruth) suggested that it must have been something Ruth had done wrong. We subsequently called in to Reading Rabbit Rescue to seek Sandra’s take on the matter. Her view was that the OAS’ defensiveness might have stemmed from a worry that we were going to ask them to pay the vets’ bills – something that hadn’t even occurred to us, but we gathered that this has happened to Sandra a few times after bondings gone wrong. We ended up jointly concluding that it probably is not a good idea to attempt to put Cassius and Chloe back together. It’s looking like the only option is to rehome Chloe, which is a shame but we do need to have two rabbits who can co-exist. We've shelved the issue until after the Christmas/New Year break but will either need to ask the OAS if they’ll take her back or wait until RRR can take her in, which Sandra indicated they might be able to do from February.

Sandra wasn’t optimistic that Chloe will be a candidate for re-bonding given her record with us and suggested that Ruth works on socializing her to get her more used to people in order to make her more suitable for re-homing as an ‘only’ bunny. Sandra did ponder whether Chloe has actually been neutered, given her aggressively territorial behaviour – we don’t know, is the answer; rescue facilities are supposed to make sure all their animals are neutered before being re-homed but Sandra suggested that animals occasionally fall through the gap on this one. Obviously Ruth and I don't have the know-how to check this, but from what Sandra said we'd expect to have noticed a smell with an un-neutered animal, which we haven't.

As we’d got Chloe with the aim of providing Cassius with a companion, we also expressed concern about him being on his own and wondered whether we should try again. Sandra’s advice was that given Cassius’ age (8), we shouldn’t worry too much – if he’d been a two-year old bunny she’d have advised trying again with a different bonding. So it looks as if he may remain on his own, which isn’t ideal - presumably preferable to being housed with a violent companion, but who knows how rabbits' minds work. Given that I'm working at home most of the time, he has fairly constant companionship in his favoured room. We’ve generally been letting him out in the late afternoon/evening to have a run about the house (albeit keeping the door to the dining room, where Chloe is, firmly closed). Here he is on Boxing Day in the living room, seemingly having a go at accessing a box of Milk Tray. The chocs were taken off him shortly after this.

Ironically, Ruth received this from the OAS in mid-December. She did consider responding with the story of Cassius and Chloe, but suspected it wouldn’t make it through the “feel-good” screening. For balance, they ought to have a “The Ones That Got Away” section, surely.