After they outgrew their exercise pen, we apprehensively put Flopsie & Mopsie outside in the larger yard that had been reinforced with extra fencing. Like before, everything was OK for maybe a day and a half, but then they started escaping out of the yard TOO. It seemed that no matter where they were, they wanted to be somewhere larger.

My husband would be sitting down in the living room in the afternoon and hear a knock on the door. It would be either our neighbor or her daughter, (not the ones with the pit bull) saying that one or both of the rabbits were in their yard. So he would bolt out of the house, sometimes grabbing our son, and go out there with the fishing net to chase them. One embarrassing morning, he had to explain to the golf course maintenance worker that he was out there chasing down his rabbit. The man laughed and said, Good luck, brah! And drove off.

Getting a bite to eat is easy when the whole backyard is your snack bar

The most stressful time was when we had to go to the neighbor islands one morning and had a 6:30 flight. At 4:30 I went out to the lanai to feed them and discovered Mopsie missing! Now, a black rabbit at night is almost impossible to see, so my husband and I grabbed flashlights and ran out onto the golf course. We found him frozen in the glare of our flashlights, on the edge of the yard with the pit bull which fortunately, was not out. “He’s over here, under the bushes,” my husband said in a loud whisper. I called to him softly, “Mopsie, Mopsie, come here boy,” but he hunkered down, refusing to budge. I found myself resorting to picking up an extremely large coconut tree branch to sweep him out from there. It had a surreal quality to it. He ran through their yard and then back into ours through a hole in the fence. This incident alone took 10 years off our lives.

For the time being at least, the escapes have stopped, as my husband has finally managed to secure the yard, or so we hope. For all we know, they may be slipping out at night, hitting the nightclubs, and then slipping back inside before dawn. The alternative is to keep them caged all the time but we enjoy seeing them sprinting around the yard, leaping into the air for no apparent reason, and grazing on the grass in the evening like little cows. The joys they give us outweighs the occasional heart attacks!