At one point my wife and I had nine rabbits living in our garage. They were a large silver-grey variety called “Champagne D’Argent.” We were, ostensibly, raising them for their meat, but we kept putting off the killing and eating them part of the process. It eventually became apparent that neither of us had the nerve to don the executioner’s mask, and so they lived in cages in our garage in a state of captive limbo for over two years. But we were good jailors (if you will pardon the oxymoron). We kept them comfortably fed and watered, we gave them interesting things to play with, and on sunny weekends we let them exercise in the yard inside a four-by-eight foot portable rabbit “playpen” that I built that had easily detachable sides made of wooden slats and wire mesh.
A planned winter trip to the west coast for several weeks gave us the incentive we needed to get rid of them. My wife and I each killed one of the rabbits by ourselves, and then one together. I won’t go into the gory details here, but our solo rabbit executions were gruesome experiences for each of us, and our lack of experience meant undue suffering for the poor creatures. The one we killed together had the most humane end. But after that, neither of us had the stomach to kill any of the others.
So I gave two away, along with their cages, to the special needs guy living next door. He was forced to give them away to someone else a few days later, and those two eventually ended up as a kid’s 4-H project at the local county fair the following summer. We drove the original mating pair to a wooded area outside of town and set them free into the wild—a transition for which they were in no way prepared, and I’m pretty sure they were eaten by foxes within a week. One escaped on his own into our backyard, and I made no attempt to recapture him. I’m not sure what happened to him, but this year the wild rabbits in our neighborhood are unusually large, and have a distinctive silver-grey coloring on their sides.
We were down to one rabbit the night before we were to leave for our trip. I decided that I would release him in the garage and provision him with a large cache of food and water, as an experiment, to see if he would still be around when we got back. The main garage door was open, but I placed a thick tarp across to help mitigate against the single-digit temperature, and bid him farewell.
Our trip was cut short by a blizzard in Montana, and we were forced to return the evening of the following day. The last rabbit was waiting for us on our back porch. I took a cage down from the supports, opened the cage door, and he hopped right in.
I’m not sure when we moved him into the house, but he spent the next year and a half in a cage in the spare room. I made a makeshift litterbox for him in the corner of the living room, and we let him run around the house in the evenings. Riley, our dog, and the rabbit would play with each other, chase each other around the house and then stop to bump noses. Occasionally the rabbit would ambush the dog, leaping at her from a full sprint and head-butting her in the side in a way that was reminiscent of the killer rabbit in the old Monty Python movie.
The rabbit got loose last week, shortly after we put his cage back out in the garage. Something must have spooked him one night, because he blew through his cage door—bending it outward from the inside like a scene from an Aliens movie. For days now he has shown up at a variety of locations around the neighborhood. A couple evenings ago he came to visit Riley while she was tied up in the backyard, and they bumped noses for old time’s sake before he scampered off to the neighbor’s neglected flower bed. He has been on the front porch all day today, pressed up against a section of the portable rabbit playpen that I have recently repurposed as a doggy-gate so that Riley can be on the front porch with us without fear of her chasing after the dogs across the street. At this moment, the rabbit is lying in the sunshine, resting calmly on the red-painted concrete with his entire side pushed against the wire mesh. He is entirely free to go anywhere he pleases, but he apparently finds comfort in the residue of his previous captivity.
This has me thinking about my own captivity. I am after all living as a domestic creature myself, although my captivity has taken a wide variety of forms over the years—so many forms that perhaps it would be better to say my “captivities.” In addition to my un-parole-able life sentence as corporate wage-slave, I stayed seventeen years in a marriage that should have never happened. I’ve spent the last twenty years living in a town where I have never fit in, in a house that has given me nothing but grief, and working at a job that I should have left at least fifteen years ago.
I am like the rabbit. Even when the opportunity for freedom presents itself, and long after the door to my cage has been flung open in front of me, I hesitate, I remain reluctant to leave my confines, preferring to be sheltered by habit in my familiar captivity. And when I do leave, it is only to return again and again to the false safety of what I know, the false safety of a familiar cage.
We fear what is outside the cage, and yet that is where true freedom lies. It’s really a kind of inversion of reality—obvious when you see it in another person or another creature—in which the walls of captivity are experienced as a protective barrier from some formless external threat rather than the concrete boundaries of an isolation chamber. I am really not that much different from a perpetually relapsing drug addict, or a battered spouse who refuses to leave her abuser.
Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t. And hell can take very subtle forms—neither fire nor darkness, but the shape of a sunny spot on the porch and the warm wire bars of a cage.
