Fobey and Toby

This picture was taken the night Fobey came home, but let's start from the beginning. I was volunteering at the shelter one Monday night, sometime in early June of 2011. Just as the night was nearing an end, a woman called, it was urgent. She had several pregnant cats, a bunny, and a guinea pig she needed to rehome as she and her daughter were moving. I took the woman's number, in hopes of getting a new rabbit; it had been a little less than a year since my first rabbit, Ella, passed away. Needless to say, my mom was not very thrilled to hear I had taken the lady's number but when I asked, she said I could have the rabbit anyway. The next day I sat on my bedroom floor staring at the little slip of paper, wondering what I would say, until finally I gathered the courage and dialed her number on my cell phone. We made

arrangements for her to drop my new pet off around five o'clock that night. Well, 5 o'clock came, and passed, and it was around 8 when we finally got a phone call from the lady saying she was lost. It took another two hours for her and her daughter to show up in packed car, with a tiny little cage smaller than my cat carrier in her daughter's lap with the smallest bunny inside. My mom was skeptical about the little black rabbit that sat inside her tiny cage and grunted and growled at us in fear, but eventually I took her down to my room for the night and began to search the internet for a name that would fit her just right. As I did so, she hopped around the room, hiding under various things and I got my camera out to take a few pictures. She was weary of me, but did come up for some pets a few times. I didn't go to bed until late that night after I had found the perfect name. Phoebe, except, I thought it was pronounce Fobey. And the name stuck.

As it turned out, I had just obtained an aggressive rabbit who was utterly terrified of the world. Knowing her cage was far to small, I searched YouTube for better alternatives and found C&C cages used to keep guinea pigs. To my amazement, I had a pile of the grids lying in my closet that I hadn't used in years. I quickly constructed a pen and laid down a thin sheet in our family room for Fobey to have free roam of. With her new found space, she began to come out of her shell a bit but at the age of 12, I was extremely upset that Fobey did not interact with me as my last bunny had. My mom explained to me it was only because she was new, and, Ella had been old and gentle. She thought no rabbit could ever be as nice as Ella, especially a small breed rabbit. Her mom had kept dwarfs when she was young, and none had ever been nice. We figured we were stuck with an aggressive rabbit who would continue to attack us for as long as we had her. We even considered getting rid of her only days after she had arrived.

I continued to search YouTube and even made my own channel, there wasn't much information about rabbits at the time, it was all guinea pigs. I didn't put out very good information in the beginning, but about a month after I got Fobey, I learned she needed to be spayed. Her behavior was because of hormones and she would be a much better pet once they were gotten rid of. I don't know why I waited so long, perhaps a lack of money, maybe something else, but it took until September to get her spayed. My aunt brought her to the vet in the morning and I sat at school all day, worrying and wondering if she would be alright. After school, my aunt brought me into town and we went to pick her up. The vet recommended that we got a softer bedding than the wood chips I had been using and restrict her movement, so she was trapped into her tiny cage once again. It took a week of force feeding, but finally Fobey was well again and nicer and sweeter than ever before.

From there I began uploading more videos, learning more about my pet and spending a lot more quality time with her. She and I formed a great bond after her spay and I began to experiment with her housing, tearing apart enclosures and improving them. I even got her litter box trained. Soon after Fobey was spayed, I found a lionhead online for adoption that I thought would be the perfect companion for her. My aunt and I both agreed, the two would be perfect together. When I asked my mom she got mad and said absolutely not. We would have no other bunnies. I accepted her answer until several months later when my mom asked me if I thought Fobey was lonely. I said I did and she told me I could get another rabbit. I was so excited and began searching the internet for a companion for my bunny. It only took a day to find the perfect rabbit on craigslist. I'm sure you can tell what's going to happen next, Toby!

I called the man who had an add about a doe, and two bucks, one of which happened to be neutered. He told me that we could come meet them on Wednesday but he had already gotten a lot of people calling about the neutered buck and he might not be there when we arrived. Wednesday came and I loaded up the car with a carrier full of fleece and hay for him to be comfortable on the ride home. Fobey was still my main priority and I wanted her to be happy and healthy, so I brought along a long list of how he should look and act to ensure the best health possible. When we met him in the man's garage, he was far from anything I had put on my list. He did not want to interact with me and his fur was in terrible quality. His cage had a wire bottom and he had never had a single strand of hay before in his entire life. Besides that, this man had already had Toby for 4 and a half years and the lady who owned him before that was the one who got him neutered, so we knew he was already old. But I could not leave him there and I handed over the twenty dollars it cost to take him home and loaded up his cage into the back of my mom's car.

Once Toby was home, I noticed a flaky patch on the back of his neck. Google informed me that he had fur mites so my mom bought me revolution for kittens and we treated both the rabbits just in case. He was a very scared rabbit who never came out of his hidey house and I couldn't get him to eat for the first day or two. Before the weekend arrived though, he seemed to be a bit happier and was eating again and ready for his first introduction to Fobey. There was a lot of mounting and chasing but they were grooming by the end, and I thought it was over, so I put them together in an x-pen in my room and left them alone. Everything went perfectly for another few months until the two began to fight. One night I woke up to grunting and chasing and I had to separate them, but I only had one hutch. I put a plastic container weighed down with bricks in one of the ramps and switched the two back and forth between the top two levels and the bottom level. This went on for a few months before I began bonding them again. It was rough at first, but eventually they were back together as a happy couple.

Once they were back together, I left the bottom doors of the hutch open and let the two have reign of my room. Things were happy for a few months until one day. The morning started normally. I woke up late as usual with only time to throw on some clothes, run a brush through my hair and bolt out the door. Fobey danced around my legs as she did every morning while I refilled their hay and dropped pellets in their bowls. When I came back from school I was planning a video on my laptop. I printed the plan and went downstairs to get my camera and get the bunnies and x-pen to bring them outside. I had my camera in my hand and turned around to get the bunnies, I was talking to them as I always did, asking them if they wanted to go outside and such, but Fobey didn't come run around my feet like normal. When I turned around I found her lying on the ground beside the pellet container, as if she had jumped onto it and fallen off. I

hoped I was wrong, but I knew I wasn't. I dropped my things on my bed and Toby ran over to me, as happy as he always was as if nothing had gone wrong that day. I ran upstairs screaming and my brother came out of his room asking what was wrong. I told him Fobey had died and we waited an agonizing couple of minutes for my mom to get home. When her car stopped at the mailbox we ran outside and told her the news, she too didn't believe it. She came downstairs with me, questioning me as to what happened, why hadn't I gone down stairs right after I came home like I always did? I have no answer to that question but from her body, we know Fobey had been gone for many hours and if I had gone down stairs right when I got home, I would have just had to wait longer for my mom to get home to tell her the news. We still have no idea what happened to her.

I leaned on Toby a lot for a couple days after Fobey's death. We were both sad and spending more time with each other was much needed. It strengthened my bond with him too. Only a week after Fobey passed I found room in my heart for another bunny and I knew I needed it to help me move on. My mom agreed and we submitted an adoption application to a rescue and were approved within several days. I picked out a few bunnies and went to go meet them, but one stuck out. Phantom. When I brought him home, he and Toby started off their relationship with a fight between their cages. Maybe Toby still missed Fobey, after all it had only been about a month since she passed, or maybe he simply did not get along with Phantom, I'll never know. But the two did not get along. In the following months, I began to notice Toby was losing weight, but blamed it on the fact that he was aging and gave him more pellets. He quit eating his hay soon after so I lowered his pellets again but he didn't go back to eating his hay. His water intake dropped as well. By this time I noticed his eyes were goopy and he was sneezing a lot. My mom brought him to the vet who said he might have a tooth problem and if he didn't get better within the week, we would have to remove his back teeth or put him to sleep. The next day I let him out and he was very wobbly and was tipping over. We rushed him back to the vet but we met with a different doctor who informed us she was not an expert but thought the last vet we saw was very wrong. She refereed us to another vet and told us she thought it could be a number of things ranging from pasturella to cancer. She sent us home with pain medications and hugged me, telling me she knew my love would be enough to help Toby. The next week, Toby came down with head tilt. We went to a completely different clinic with a vet who knew what she was doing. She couldn't run any tests because Toby was so frail and underweight but she assumed he had E-Coli or cancer. We agreed to let him keep fighting as long as he ate and took home sub-q fluids to administer twice a day at home. Unfortunately, Toby stopped eating, but I was away in a different state so my mom kept force feeding him and giving him fluids until I got home. I wasn't as upset over his death as I was with Fobey because he had suffered for so long, but I miss him dearly and I no rabbit could ever replace him. He keeps a truly special place in my heart.

I wanted to dedicate a page to the two rabbits who started everything.

They are so dearly missed and deserve something like this to be remembered by.