The successor

The Flemish Overlord throne has been passed to a new wabbit!

Suzanne and I drove up to a breeder in Pennsylvania last night -- a different breeder than the place we got Ben last summer -- and came home with a truly massive nine-week-old sandy buck with an excellent temperament and a fine set of ears.

If you're trying to picture what "sandy" is, picture your classic wild brown wabbit. Then triple its size and give it bigger feet.

He hasn't suggested his name yet, but we assume it will be majestic, just as he is. Amazingly, he is almost as large at nine weeks as Ben was at six months. I'd have to guess he's already seven pounds, and looks very well-formed and balanced. His colors are nice, he has the little black tips on his ears I liked in Ben, and he has enormous soft lips that he uses to sample everything. This morning he was on the windowsill in the bedroom, gnawing on my cigar box, and then he decided it'd be fun to throw stuff at me.

Wabbits throw things when they're annoyed or playing... they pick them up in their teeth and then shake their heads, sometimes throwing stuff across the room. In this case, I wasn't sure what the motivation was. He picked up a plastic cup Suzanne has next to the bed and threw it at me, and then started rooting around for other projectiles. I picked him up and snorfled him firmly, and he started clacking his teeth, so all was well.

The cats paid basically no attention to him, and he to them. The breeder where he was born had lots of cats around the place and the cats pretty much ignored the wabbits there, too, so for him to come to a house loaded with cats seems to be no problem at all. One thing we've noticed, though, is that the seems to be quite warm. At the breeder, he was outside in hutches all the time, so I suspect his fur is denser than it needs to be when he's in a heated house. I assume he'll shed a bit over the next month as he adjusts.

One other thing he has to adjust to is living in a world where he is by far the most enormous wabbit, and it must be puzzling to him to have non-enormous wabbits around. The three other wabbits are very curious about him, but not yet ready to appoint him leader of the pack. He stays in his enclosure and eats and drinks and contemplates a world where not every organism is his size or larger. All he's ever known are other Flemish Giants, so this is probably quite a culture shock to him, particularly as young as he is.

He's gonna be damn big.