The Tale of the Other Bunny-Breeding Girl

Once upon a time, in a completely different kingdom, there was a girl who had many bunnies (in fact, she had so many bunnies that sometimes her house looked as if the floor were covered with soft fur).

She loved them all, and she could have kept them in her house, but one day, one of her friends encouraged her to show them to the villagers, and the girl opened her door and built special pens for the bunnies. Since she wasn’t doing this for gold, she placed a board near the bunnies that read “Free to good homes”.

The friend who had encouraged her to do this mentioned the bunnies to her other friends, and people started coming to see the bunnies.

Sometimes, the girl made a few mistakes, and there was a tiny knot in the fur of bunnies that had been put up for adoption, but it seldom happened, and the girl learnt better than to rush things.

In the first years, the girl had regular visitors who came to chat with her a bit before they headed home with a new bunny to pet and love, but things changed as more people offered bunnies-for-free and the activity became more usual, so to speak.

Bunnies-for-free became so common that the girl found herself with a lot of adopted bunnies, but they were almost all taken by people who didn’t even wait for her to show up and say “Hello!”. They walked by, took bunnies and left.

The girl could see that the bunnies were being taken (and loved, because she’d heard stories of breeders of bunnies-for-free who had to face criticism for offering bunnies in poor health, but not hers), but apart from a faithful tiny group of people, she no longer saw anyone.

Years and years after she started offering bunnies, and after she travelled to meet other bunny breeders who gave her tips to improve her work, the girl decided to try something new, and under the board that offered her bunnies, she added a piece of parchment that read: “Dear Visitor, why not wait for me to just chat a bit or leave me an address to contact you? I’d like some feedback on my bunnies. See you soon!”.

The piece of parchment was long gone with the wind when the girl decided that the silence hurt too much. She dearly loved the people who stopped by her house before they picked up a bunny, but these were a tiny fraction of the people who enjoyed the company of her bunnies.

It hurt.

It hurt, whilst it was supposed to be fun.

It hurt so much that the girl decided that it was time to change things for good.

She told her faithful visitors that her bunnies would be kept in a different place from now on, and that all they had to do to have one for free was to come see her and she’d take them to the new pens. She also warned them that the new bunnies were of slightly different colours.

On the board near the old pens, she added another piece of parchment that read: “Enjoy the bunnies; they’re the last ones I’m putting here. Thank you, and goodbye.”.

Then, it started…

First she found letters pinned under her message asking her to not stop breeding bunnies.

Then…

Then, at last, some of the people who’d been visiting the pens and taking the bunnies over the past years waited for her to show up when she fed the remaining bunnies.

The first one said, ‘I know I cannot force you to go on doing this, but it’d be awesome if you did keep doing it. Your bunnies are cute beasts, and I like them a lot.’

The girl was so utterly flabbergasted that she was properly stunned when she answered, ‘Ta! And sorry, but I can’t go on.’ Then she fed the last bunnies, and when she turned around, the visitor had already left.

There were a few more visitors like that. Always people who’d been taking bunnies for years and had never said a word until then.

Then, there was that visitor who said, ‘I’ve been getting bunnies from your pens for years, and I’m so sad to see that you’re going to stop breeding bunnies.’

By then, the girl was beyond sadness and frustration. She looked at that visitor and yelled, ‘If you liked them so much, couldn’t you bloody let me know once in all those years?! I’ve never seen you before. Where were you when I had no one to talk to? It’s too late now. You broke my heart!’

The visitor looked at the bunny-breeder and fled, thinking that she’d become mad, or that she thought she was important whilst she was just breeding bunnies-for-free, or that she was being unfair because she did see that the bunnies were being taken and that should have been bloody enough for that girl.

The visitor never understood. Neither did the others since they’d ignored the first plea for more communication.

The girl made sure that the first bunnies were all taken eventually, and she started breeding a new species of bunnies, and she was damn proud – not because she’d come up with a new species that she hoped her faithful followers would like, no (she was quite lucid on that head). No, she was proud for not hitting the strangers who asked her to go on breeding bunnies-for-free once she’d decided to stop doing that; she really wanted to, but she refrained from doing it… That, and she was busy chatting with the visitors of her new pens.