Four of them right now, in a big pen made of wire storage cubes, plus my own two, Hazel and Wilbur, who have the run of the house and have decided the couch is theirs. I've been a foster home for Twin Rivers Rabbit Rescue since the spring of 1997. Since then 31 rabbits have come through my living room and gone on to homes of their own, and I have cried at every single one of the adoptions, which the adopters find alarming.

I started this page because I answer the same questions over and over at adoption days, and because every year around May the rescue's phone starts ringing with people who bought a bunny for Easter and now "don't have time for it." If even one person reads this page and decides to get a chocolate rabbit instead of a real one, it was worth typing.

Nothing here is a substitute for a rabbit-savvy veterinarian, and I mean rabbit-savvy: many vets see mostly dogs and cats, and rabbits are different in almost every way that matters. Ask the rescue for a referral. Ask before you need one.

All of these are available for adoption through Twin Rivers, spayed or neutered, litter trained (mostly; see below), and seen by the vet. I'd love to show you pictures but my film from the last adoption day is still at the drugstore, and the drugstore is not fast. Descriptions will have to do.

Adopted since spring: Daisy (April), Thumper and Juniper together (May), Oliver (July), Nutmeg (August), and Smokey, who took 14 months to find the right person and found her in September. Smokey's new mom sends me e-mail every week. I don't tell her it's too much because it isn't.

Almost everything people "know" about rabbits is wrong: that they live in a hutch in the backyard, eat carrots and pellets, are good pets for small children, and only live a couple of years. Here's the truth, as the rescue and our vet teach it.

Hay is the diet. Not pellets: hay. An adult rabbit should have unlimited grass hay (timothy, orchard grass, oat hay, or a mix) available every hour of every day, and it should be the great majority of what they eat. It keeps the gut moving and it wears down their teeth, which grow continuously their whole lives. A rabbit that doesn't eat enough hay gets overgrown teeth and a sluggish digestive system, and both can kill. Alfalfa hay is for rabbits under about seven months and for nursing mothers; it's too rich in calcium and calories for adults.

Pellets are a supplement, a small measured amount of plain timothy-based pellets, roughly a quarter cup a day for a five-pound rabbit. Not the mixes with seeds, corn and colored bits; those are candy. Not an endless bowl.

Fresh greens every day, two or three kinds, a good handful or two for an average rabbit: romaine, green and red leaf lettuce, cilantro, parsley, dandelion greens, kale and carrot tops in moderation. No iceberg lettuce (it's water and nothing else). Introduce new greens one at a time. Carrots, apple and banana are treats, a slice or a chunk, not a meal; they're sugar. No bread, crackers, cereal, chocolate, nuts, or anything from your plate.

Water, fresh, always, in a heavy crock they can't tip or a bottle they'll actually use (most prefer the crock and drink more from it).

Rabbits live indoors. Outdoor hutch rabbits die of heat (anything over the mid-80s is dangerous; they can't sweat or pant), of fright when a raccoon or a dog comes by at night, of flystrike, and of plain loneliness. A house rabbit that lives with you lives 8 to 12 years and becomes a real member of the family, with a personality as distinct as any cat's. A hutch rabbit lives a couple of years and nobody notices.

Housing: a big pen or an exercise pen, not a small cage, with a solid floor (wire hurts their feet), a litter box, a hay rack or a pile of hay in the box, a hidey box, and several hours a day of supervised time out in a bunny-proofed room. Two rabbits are happier than one, but introducing two rabbits is a slow, careful, sometimes dramatic process, and both must be fixed first. The rescue helps with this.

Do not bathe a rabbit. Ever. They groom themselves like cats. A full bath can send a rabbit into shock, and wet fur takes hours to dry and chills them. A dirty bottom is a sign of a diet or a health problem, and you spot-clean it with a damp cloth and call the vet.

Handling: most rabbits hate being picked up; they're prey animals and being lifted means an owl has them. Sit on the floor and let them come to you. When you must lift one, one hand under the chest and one supporting the hindquarters, held against your body. Never, ever by the ears, and never let the back legs dangle; a rabbit that kicks in midair can break its own back.

Nails need trimming every 4 to 6 weeks. Teeth should be checked by the vet. And the single most important thing: a rabbit that hasn't eaten or pooped in 12 hours is an emergency. Not tomorrow. Now. Their gut can shut down (the vet calls it GI stasis) and it goes bad fast. Every rabbit person learns this, and I would rather you learn it from me than the hard way.

Yes, rabbits use a litter box, and most learn faster than kittens. The trick is that rabbits choose a corner to go in and then keep going there, so you don't train the rabbit; you put the box where the rabbit already goes.

1. Start in a small space: the pen, or one bathroom. Watch where the rabbit picks. Put the box in that corner. If they pick a different corner, move the box. Two boxes is fine.
2. Put hay in the box. Rabbits eat and go at the same time (they're peculiar that way), so a litter box with a big handful of hay at one end is irresistible. This is the whole secret.
3. Scoop any stray droppings into the box and wipe up any puddles with white vinegar, so the smell goes where you want it.
4. Spay or neuter (see below). An unfixed rabbit sprays and scatters droppings to mark territory, and no amount of training beats hormones. A fixed rabbit's habits improve within a few weeks.
5. Expand the territory a room at a time, once they're reliable in the small space. Expect some "marking" droppings in a new room; they stop.

Litter: use a paper-based litter (the recycled newspaper pellets), aspen shavings, or plain wood-stove pellets, which are cheap and work very well. Do not use clay or clumping cat litter (they eat it, and it can block the gut), and no pine or cedar shavings (the fumes are hard on their liver). A layer of litter, a big pile of hay on top, dump the whole thing daily or every other day. A rabbit's box kept clean has hardly any smell at all.

The little round dry droppings that roll out of the box are not a training failure; those are practically odorless and vacuum right up. A rabbit will also eat some of its own soft night droppings (cecotropes) straight from the source, which is normal and necessary and I will not explain it at the dinner table.

Every rabbit the rescue adopts out is already spayed or neutered, and here's why we insist:

• Unspayed female rabbits have an extremely high rate of uterine cancer by middle age; our vet says the majority of intact does over four will get it. A spay at 5 or 6 months prevents it entirely.
• Fixed rabbits don't spray, don't mount everything in the house, and litter train. Intact ones are a mess and know it.
• A fixed rabbit is calmer, friendlier and can live with a companion rabbit. Two intact rabbits will fight, or breed, or both.
• And breeding: a doe can have a litter of 6 to 10 every month. There are not enough homes. There are not enough homes for the ones already here. That's the whole reason I have four rabbits in my living room.

The surgery needs a vet experienced with rabbits (anesthesia is trickier than in cats and dogs), and it costs more than you'd think, $75 to $150 in our area. The rescue's adoption fee is $35 and includes it, which is a bargain, and one more reason to adopt instead of buying at a pet store or a feed store.

Rabbits chew. Their teeth grow all their lives and chewing is how they keep them down, and also how they explore, and also, I'm fairly sure, how they express opinions. You will not train this out. You bunny-proof instead.

• Electrical cords are the big one. A rabbit can bite through a lamp cord in one chomp and it can kill them. Run every cord through the split plastic tubing from the hardware store, or the spiral cord wrap from the computer store, or up off the floor. Every cord. Every room they're in. Marigold found the one I missed.
• Baseboards and furniture legs: block them with the wire cube panels, or paint them with the bitter apple spray (works on some rabbits, amuses others).
• Carpet and rug corners: put a ceramic tile or a flat board over the favorite spot. Some rabbits dig at carpet too; a cardboard box full of shredded paper gives them somewhere to do it.
• Houseplants: up high. Many common houseplants are poisonous to rabbits and they'll try them all.
• Give them the right things to chew: untreated apple or willow branches, plain cardboard boxes (they love a box with two doors cut in it), the cardboard tubes from paper towels stuffed with hay, untreated wicker baskets, and a phone book to shred. A rabbit with plenty to chew and dig and hide in chews less of your house. Not none. Less.

Books, by the way, are apparently delicious. Bottom shelf is bunny shelf. You'll learn.

Twin Rivers Rabbit Rescue is a small all-volunteer group; there's no shelter building, just a dozen foster homes like mine. Here's how it goes:

1. E-mail me ([email protected]) and tell me a little about your home, your other pets, whether there are kids and how old, and what kind of rabbit you're hoping for. I'll pass it on to the adoption coordinator, or if it's one of my fosters, we'll talk directly.
2. Fill out the application. It asks where the rabbit will live (indoors is required), who your vet is, and what you'll do when you go on vacation. It's not a test; it's a conversation.
3. Come meet the rabbits. At the foster home, on the floor, with time to sit. If you already have a rabbit, we'll set up a "bunny date" on neutral ground to see if they can stand each other.
4. Adoption fee is $35, which doesn't come close to covering the spay or neuter, the vet check and the food. It's really a promise that you're serious.
5. Take your rabbit home with a starter bag of the hay and pellets they're used to, a care sheet, and my e-mail address. If it doesn't work out, for any reason, at any time, the rabbit comes back to us. That's in the contract and I mean it.

Adoption days: the rescue sets up at the farm store on the highway the second Saturday of the month, 11 to 3, with a few fosters in pens for people to meet. Next ones are October 9 and November 13. Come say hi even if you're not adopting. Bring a bag of timothy hay if you want to make a foster mom very happy.

I know it's September. I'm putting this up now so it's here when you search for it in March.

Every spring, feed stores and pet stores fill their front windows with baby bunnies, six weeks old, $10 or $15 apiece, and every spring people buy them for their children on impulse because they are, honestly, the cutest thing on earth. Then the following things happen, in this order:

1. The bunny is put in a small cage with a bowl of pellets and a carrot.
2. The child tries to carry it around like a stuffed animal. The bunny, who is a prey animal, struggles and scratches. The child cries. The bunny gets put down and not picked up again.
3. At four or five months the bunny hits puberty. It starts spraying, digging, biting the cage bars, lunging at hands. The family says it "turned mean." It didn't; it's a teenager and it isn't fixed.
4. The cage moves to the garage. Then the backyard.
5. Sometime in May or June, the family calls the rescue, or the shelter, or nobody, and just opens the hutch door in a park "so it can be free." That's how I got Clover. Most of them aren't as lucky.

Our rescue takes in three to four times as many rabbits in May and June as in any other months. The shelters put most of theirs down, because rabbits don't get adopted from shelters like dogs and cats do.

So please: if you're thinking of a bunny for Easter, get a chocolate one. Or a stuffed one. If your family truly wants a rabbit, wait until June, when the Easter bunnies come to the rescue, and adopt a grown one who's already fixed and litter trained and whose personality you can see. A rabbit is a ten-year commitment, an indoor pet, a daily-hay-and-greens-and-litter-box pet, and, for a young child, a pet to sit quietly with, not a pet to hold. If that sounds like your family, I'd love to talk to you. If it doesn't, the chocolate one is delicious and nobody has to open a hutch door in a park.

Thank you for reading this far. Really.

September 22, 1999. Marigold discovered the hem of the living room curtains. Curtains are now eight inches shorter and look, my sister says, "intentional." Pippin let me pet him for four whole minutes tonight, then bit the sleeve of my sweater to let me know it was his idea. Clover has started tooth-purring when I put the hay in. Progress on every front except the curtains.

September 11. Adoption day. Nobody adopted, but two families took applications and one of them asked all the right questions about hay and I have a good feeling about Biscuit. A little girl sat on the floor by Clover's pen for twenty minutes without trying to grab her once. Her mother said she'd been "reading a rabbit page on the computer." I did not say anything. I did go to the car and cry a little.

September 4. Smokey went home! Fourteen months. Fourteen months of "she's not very friendly, is she," and then a quiet woman named Ruth walked in, sat down, and Smokey climbed into her lap. I have never seen that rabbit climb into anyone's lap. There is a person for every rabbit. Sometimes it just takes fourteen months.

August 27. Bad night. Wilbur stopped eating at dinner and by 11 p.m. was hunched in the corner with his eyes half shut. Emergency vet, fluids, gut medication, a very long night on the floor with a syringe of critical care food. He was eating hay again by morning and is fine, and this is exactly why I tell everyone: twelve hours, no exceptions, go. I am too old for these nights. I will do them anyway.

August 15. Nutmeg adopted, to a retired couple who have had rabbits before and know about the cords. The best kind of adopter. Took Marigold in the same week from a woman who found her in a box by the highway. One out, one in. It never stops. I wouldn't know what to do if it did.