Copyright (c) 2000 by Michael Finley

Life sans testicles took another loopy turn. Beau, who had spent a year of his life overlooking the creatures who frequented our back yard, now became obsessed with them. No squirrel could descend from a tree without Beau clambering up on the drapes, banging on the window pane and yelling at it.

Worse than squirrels were rabbits. Rabbits are not supposed to be a poodle's passion -- they are bird dogs, to the extent they are still hunters. But Beau's interest in birds begins and ends with the occasional tidbit of chicken we toss him after supper.

But now, like the chain-gang prisoner in Cool Hand Luke who yearned to escape to attend his momma's funeral, Beau had rabbit in his blood. Noelle and John, besides owning Sonja and Cobi, also have rabbits, having had an older male named Chewbacca for years, and recently adopting a young black female they found in the wild at a picnic, named Agnes. The plan was to keep these creatures apart, but one day Beau, smelling rabbits, leapt through the kitchen door and knocked down a partition separating the two creatures. Amid the 100 seconds of hullabaloo that followed, and before the two rabbits were resequestered, Chewbacca found time to have his way with Agnes. Thus Beau became a kind of bunny's uncle, or dogfather, to the litter that followed shortly thereafter.

Beau's interest in dogs suddenly rollercoastered. Where he became passionately puppy-like with them right after his surgery, now, a month or so later, he lost all interest in them. And they, to be fair, smelled something diminished about him. His new allegiance was to the dozen baby bunnies squirming in a plastic tub in the Morrisons’ basement. He was dying to go down there, and later, when they were placed in the hutch on their back porch, he would camp out there and press his nose against the stiff screen.

Events now piled on to heat Beau's bunny lust to boiling stage. Another neighbor, Fritz Ludwig, decided to grow rabbits for food, behind our alley. At times there were as many as six large Belgian hares crowded in a pen, dropping their mild duds through their chickenwire floor in a steaming, odoriferous stew.

The winds that winter seemed almost always to waft from the rabbit pen directly to Beau's nostrils. Twenty four hours a day, he would walk through the house on the tips of his toes, his eyes bugging out from excitation. If a door opened even a crack, he was out like a shot, racing past the alley to the Ludwigs' rabbits, whom he would eyeball, and occasionally bark at.

Upon entering their gate he would dash onto their back porch and press his face against the hutch, and stare at them mega-intensely until one of them blinked, upon which he would start barking and bellowing.

We often asked ourselves, what would Beau do if he got at a rabbit? A poodle is a retriever, trained to deny himself the gratification of the kill, and to fetch the game back to the hunter. Would he kill it quickly, or slowly, or not at all? Was he thinking about blood and bunny fur splattered everywhere, or the fascination he still feels for his stuffed animal toys back in the house, under the couch, where he has pushed them with his useless, thumbless hands and now, vexed at the intricacies of life with humans, cannot get them out?

We didn’t know. What we did know was that it would not go well with Noelle and John, who have shown Beau every courtesy in his young life, for him to devour their pets, or with the Ludwigs, who have also been forbearing, for him to devour their dinner.

Spring came, and the bunny litter grew, and Daniele conspired with Noelle and John to take two of the bunnies. Every night Daniele, too shy to go to the Morrisons on her own, would beg me to make a social call, so she could tag along and nuzzle the baby bunnies in the kitchen. In her wood class at school, unbeknownst to me, she was crafting something heavy and wonderful, a rabbit pen for our backyard.

Now the pen was set up, and actual bunnies were living under our own roof. Beau's nerves were stretched to the breaking point. He actually lost weight during the first week.

One day, when no one was looking, his excitement became too much, and he pushed his face through the light window screen Daniele had used in constructing the hutch. He broke the door, precipitating a family crisis. Daniele, who was truly devoted to her little bunnies, now regarded the dog, the dog we got for her, and who was behaving pretty much as nature and breeding dictated to him to behave, as hateful and a danger to her charges.

Daniele was twelve when we got Beau, and is 14 now -- no longer a scared child, she is an assertive teenager, and she is angry that the dog has ruined the hutch she made with her hands. It didn’t help when her father applied his withered carpentry skills to her artwork and made it worse.