Happy Gotcha Day!

[naturestee]

Has anyone else heard of Gotcha Days? You celebrate the day you adopted your pet instead of it's birthdate, sometimes because you don't know when their birthdate is. When are your Gotcha Days?

Mocha's was yesterday- and I forgot.:baghead A year ago yesterday, James and I went to a petstore and fell in love with a litter of small dark brown baby dwarfs. We went home and I went to sleep while he talked to the landlord. When I woke up, one of the other bedroom doors was mysteriously closed... I opened the door and there was one of those little brown dwarf bunnies, running a bunny 500 in her cage! We named her Mocha, and she hooked us on rabbits.

Mocha at about 3 months:

Mocha around 4 months:

Adult Mocha:

 

[iamawesum69420]

Gotcha Days are so great! I didn't know there was really such a thing but I had already planned on celebrating Velma's birthday on the day that I got her since I don't really know her real birthdate. It's cool that something like that already exists and I'll be sure to celebrate hers in about 11 months. :bunny18

 

[Maureen Las]

Since I have six rabbits that I "gotcha" at different times I will do a rabbit a day for the next 6 days. Babette is approx. 5 yrs. old this spring. About 5 years ago in the winter I lost my very first rabbit Sheba. She was very old and had glacuoma so could no longer see.She had once been a gorgeous black mini-lop with big brown eyes. I had found her abandoned in Lincoln Park in Chicago sometime in the early ninties. Anyway several months after she passed away my husband and I went in a petstore near Chicago and saw 2 female bunnies that were so small they fit in the palm of my hand.I picked the one that seemed most outgoing , a broken gold and white mini-lop, and after much thought my husband picked the name Babette. The name suits her perfectly as she is sort of distant,snobbish and fearless. She totally destroyed our living room when she was a baby. She is now much quieter,actually a veryspecial bunny and she is bonded to my 2nd rabbit Beau who I will describe tomorrow. :bunnydance:

 

[Maureen Las]

Several years after I got Babette I began to volunteer at a no-kill cat and rabbit shelter in the suburbs of Chicago. Most of the rabbits were large with a healthy appearance. In one cage,however, was a small frightened looking mini-lop with a runny eye. He was the saddest rabbit in the facility so he was the one I adopted . I had him neutered and his tear duct treated and named him Jacques. I tried to bond him with Babette but since he had not been neutered as a very young rabbit he continuously humped her to the point that she couldn't rest so I kept them separately. About a month or two after I adopted him we moved to Wi.

 

[TinysMom]

I'm really enjoying these stories..

Peg

 

[Maureen Las]

Good...I thought I was writing them for myself

 

[spitfire]

Oooohhhh! This is such a fun forum!!! By the way -- hi everyone! I'm Jane!
I remember my gotcha day - not the actual day but I remember everything else. We had just moved into a rented house where we couldn't have dogs and I was pretty upset about not having my dog. I begged my husband for days to let me have a cute sweet tiny quiet bunny but he wouldn't give in. So, one night, I waited for him to be just about asleep and DRUNK. I asked him again - it was about 3 o'clock in the morning. He said yes! So before he had awakened the next morning I had answered an ad in the paper for bunnies for sale, picked one out, bought a cage and drove back home as fast as I could to set it up before he awoke!!! When he woke up, he was pretty upset but I reminded him that he had said yes! lol.
That was almost 17 years ago and now I have tons of bunnies!! Haha! Silly man should know better than to deny me my furry little creatures!:wink:

 

[Bassetluv]

So, one night, I waited for him to be just about asleep and DRUNK. I asked him again - it was about 3 o'clock in the morning. He said yes! So before he had awakened the next morning I had answered an ad in the paper for bunnies for sale, picked one out, bought a cage and drove back home as fast as I could to set it up before he awoke!!! When he woke up, he was pretty upset but I reminded him that he had said yes! lol.

LOL Jane, I like the way you think! Your poor husband never knew what hit him. (And I bet he loved thatbunny just as much as you, once he got used to him.)

I don't really celebrate the day I got any animal, though I do remember each one. Raph was last year in July (would have to look it up in my journal to recall the exact date)...my sis gave me a ride out to the airport to pick him up. As soon as I looked in his carrier and saw that one huge brown eye staring out at me, there was an instant 'connection'...Irecognized him at a soul level. It was a feeling of finding another soulmate that I hadn't seen in eons.

And now the same thing happened - to a bit of a lesser degree - with the new rabbitI just adopted. I saw her photo on the Humane Society website and it stopped me cold. She's a plainagouti rabbit, nothing about her standsout, yet I felt this*pull* towards her.For the next two weeks I found myself drawn back to the website again and again...until I finally relented and went to see her. And as soon as I did there was an instant feeling of knowing her from some other time and place. She's home now, and I'm keeping an eye on her as she recuperates from her spay...she's skittish and tends to hide under the bed a lot. (And no wonder; she's been through so much these past few weeks...abandoned in the city streets, taken to the HC, people looking at her every day, dogs barking around her...then being shuttled off to a vet clinic for surgery, and taken to a strange new home that night. I'd be a bit more than skittish myself...lol.) If I attempt to go to her and pick her up, she runs. But the moment I sit downon the floor, out she comes...she will put her paws on my shoulder and sniff me, orcircle me and then hop onto (or over) my legs. Her name isAnna,and she's definitely a soulmate of mine as well.

 

[bunnydude]

The day I got Devon and Amber was the best! June 26! I remember seeing them in person for the first time, running and binkying around the floor. Great memories!

 

[northerndancer]

I like this thread!

Northern dancers gotcha day is my birthday!!!!!! My husband brought a box home for me for my birhtday and inside was "another rabbit!!!!!!"

I remember his wee face peeping up at me:bunnydance:

Flo we got one day when we saw her at the garden centre. She was our first bunny.

Liz

 

[Maureen Las]

Spitfire...I do devilishly manipulative things with my husbands mind to get morerabbits.......I use every ploy I can come up with and usually I get the rabbit

 

[Maureen Las]

Rabbit #3 Beau....Several months after we moved to Wi. my special dog Bonne was diagnosed with an abdominal mass (turns out they were wrong). I thought that I was going to lose her and was very upset. so I bought a wee mini-lop in a really awful pet store and named him Beau. (some people go clothes shopping so I buy a rabbit) I introduced Beau to Babette and it was love at first sight. They absolutely adored each other and neither one of them has looked at me again. They spend most of every day grooming each other and gazing into each others eyes:inlove::inlove:

 

[Maureen Las]

Rabbit #4 Joey...About one year ago I had gotten a dog transported from a rescue in Michigan that I thiought would be a perfect addition to our family. Unfortunately she turned out to have a very high prey drive, and although I was heartbroken I had to give her up because of my smaller pets. I found awonderful group near here who foster dogs in homes and then adopt them out to approprate homes. They took her for me and found her a wonderful home in Chicago. One of the rescuers knew I loved rabbits and told me thatshe had a neutered male rabbit about 1 yr. old that the kids had tired of. "He just sits in the basement in a cage and gets no attention" Of course I took him and named him Joey. He was not friendly at all but growled and hissed and sometimes bit. I think he had really been ignored. He really didn't get much nicer until he got into a fight with one of my other neutered males and went into a bout of severe GI stasis. This was just about the time I joined this forum. I nursed him back but it took weeks and he had to be handled a lot . After he recovered his disposition had softened and he is now a really sweet guy... and I was able to bond him with my tiny min-lop Jacques.

 

[naturestee]

After I got Mocha, I really wanted a second bunny. Both for me and for her, as the little princess needed more attention than I could give her. She's not a bun that can live alone. I waited until a month after she was spayed, and while I waited I looked at the buns on Petfinder. James and I both fell in love with a sweet chinchilla mix, and also liked several boy Dutch that were at the same shelter, so we took Mocha in for a date. Well, that shelter rarely updates their listings and not a single one of those buns was still there. In fact, there was only one boy there at the time- a roly-poly dutch named Rascal. Rascal seemed to like Mocha and us. It was hard to gauge Mocha's reaction to him because she was scared of the dogs barking and she refused to come out of her carrier. We put in an application, and brought Rascal home the next Monday, which was June 20th 2005. I named him Loki, because Rascal didn't seem to fit. He shaped up with lots of exercise. I did have some trouble bonding them because Mocha was very upset over having her territory invaded, but now they are inseparable.

 

[naturestee]

I adopted Fey and Sprite on September 11, 2005. This is copied from the thead I made that day:

I had been arguing with myself for a while over whether I could handle more rabbits right now. Theoretically I would always love to have more, but is it fair to them? Well, there was an add in the shopping paper (all classifieds and ads) a few days ago for two dwarf hotots, with cage, for $15:shock:. I just had this feeling that they belonged with me.

I called the guy and he said they were his granddaughters. About 1.5 years old, living outside behind his barn. She would spend some time with them during summer, but would only visit them like once every couple of weeks when school was on. Well, school just started and he felt bad about them being completely alone (except for him feeding them) for another long cold winter. He had bought them from a local show breeder for $15 dollars for the pair as they are not showable, and the cage was from a friend, so he just wanted what he had paid the breeder for them.

I saw them yesterday. I knew I would most likely take them anyway as long as they didn't have any obvious disease. I will pick them up this morning. They really need some TLC. Their fur was stained with urine- their only things to sit on other than wire were really old and completely soaked and caked. They are not used to being handled any more and one was rather cage aggressive. She didn't want to hurt us though, just to scare us out of her home. She was gnawing on James' finger and never left a scratch. The cage looks pretty gross, but I'll clean it as much as I can and use it until they start learning about the litterbox and I get them something bigger. It's fairly roomy for a breeder cage as they are small compared to it. I hate wire-bottom cages in general, though.

Their current names are Flopsy and Mopsy. He wasn't sure which one was supposed to be which.

*************************************************************
Later that day, after I brought them home:

She (Fey) may look fat, but she feels solid and her skin is tight. I can feel the spine and hips on both of these girls. We checked the little one as she was humping the big one, but I couldn't find any testicles or anything. She's just feisty and bossy. Their nails were wicked long (and twisted) so we cut those. The pan on the cage was rusted through so we left that behind. We will be setting up the cage over a heavy duty shower curtain with newspaper for now. Currently it is soaking in our bathtub because it's caked in poop and hair. The girls are running free in our bathroom until the cage is clean. We'll be using the bathroom for quarantine for a couple of weeks.

Their poop is huge and soft- about the size of their eyes. It's absolutely disgusting. I'm hoping that hay and a switch to decent pellets will fix that.

Fey and Sprite are now white again, healthy, spayed, and almost totally rebonded after I had to separate Fey to let her heal from an injury. It took a long time for these girls to trust me, and Sprite still has issues with being touched. Part of it is probably her personality, but I think she may have been handled roughly too.

 

[Maureen Las]

How can people keep animals in that condition? I'm so glad that you gave them a life.!

 

[Maureen Las]

Rabbit #5 Rudy..I started volunteering at the humane society last may and within 2 months or so we had two rabbits there. At the time I started no one even named the rabbits ...they were #1 and #2. They were there the entire summer and by that time I had named them Corky and Rudy. By late summer I had fallen in love with Rudy who is a big plump white bunny who is very mellow and charming. I adopted him in late summer and had him neutered. The day after he was neutered he passed a segment of a tapeworm and I was totally freaked (didn't know that rabbits could get those). He was treated with Drontal which is used for kittens and is 100% fine. He isn't bonded yet but someday I may find a companion for him. He is still big, mellow and a real sweetie.

 

[peapoo_bunny]

i got peapoo on october 30th,the day before halloween and my birthday

 

[Maureen Las]

Rabbit #6 Peewee. Peewee was at he shelter for months and is a sweet small harlequin mix. I was told that because of space he would be euthanized the following day..my husband heard me on the phone with the volunteer coordinator and I think he felt sorry for me as I adored this rabbit i immediately rushed to the shelter filled out the application and took him home the following day. He is playful, curious, affectionate, and just a pure delight. I am now at my rabbit limit.

 

[RebeccaUK]

My bunnies Gotcha days are:

12th September for Benjamin and

17th December for Twinkle

We celebrate these like birthdays for the bunnies.