Ridiculously Sad

I had the best and worst days of Peace Corps this past weekend. On Friday morning I found in my rabbit hutch this tiny, red, squirming being. I didn’t even know my rabbit was pregnant. Previously, I had been waiting for the female rabbit to get pregnant so I could move her away from the male and put her in the section of the hutch that has a more solid flooring (the bigger part of the hutch has branches nailed together as a floor but there are gaps between the branches). When I only found one baby rabbit I figured that she didn’t have many and the others must have fallen out and been ate by one of the many wild dogs in my area. All Friday and Saturday I brought the baby to the mom to feed it because the female rabbit wanted nothing to do with the rabbit yet. On Saturday I went to another PCV’s events and arrived home about 7:30pm. Upon arrival, everyone told me my goat gave birth that afternoon in the rain. I ran to my neighbor’s house to find my goat with her two twin babies. But they were all soaking wet and crying. The babies just lied there in a basin with clothes to keep them warm. Again, one of my animals gave birth and doesn’t want to be a mom. Between my neighbor and I we can’t hold down my goat long enough to get milk from her. We leave her with her babies in a storeroom to sleep and stay out of the rain. At this point I thought everything was going great. It was so exciting to see the newborn goats (SOOO cute) and have my rabbits give birth, even though only one. I was so happy and energized, thinking about the next few weeks when my baby animals would grow.

The next morning everything started going downhill. First, I awoke at 6:30am by my neighbor bringing my goat back to her shack (she didn’t stay there at night because of the cold and the threat of wild dogs eating her babies). At that point I found that my rabbits escaped because in the original hutch the builder made the floor out of branches and mud, but he didn’t nail the branches down. So the rabbits dug up the dirt and clawed away the branches. So now I had this 2-day-old rabbit with no mom. I had to turn my attention to my goat for the moment. I tried all day to get milk from my goat, feed the babies with a straw, teach them how to walk, keep them warm, and generally keep an eye on them. When I tried to feed the baby rabbit the goat’s milk it didn’t want it and it was so small I couldn’t find a way to force the milk down it’s throat, like I had been doing with the baby goats. Well the baby goats weren’t doing well-they just lied there, refusing to eat, stand, only sometimes they cried out for their mom, who was almost ignoring them and completely refusing to let the babies get milk. By late afternoon one of the babies had died and the other one was following suite. I felt like such a failure and an awful caretaker. Even though the odds were against me because according to my teachers the babies were premature and being born in the rain made it so they immediately became sick, I still wanted to nurse them back to health.

The next morning I found the other baby goat had passed away. The only good thing up to this point was my baby rabbit was still alive. I don’t now how it had survived up to this point because I had repeatedly (literally 10 times that day) tried to feed it goats milk, almost drowning it many times, but it wouldn’t drink it and other wise stayed in a shoebox with an old shirt I gave it. Then, like the other babies, Wednesday morning I found it dead in the shoebox.

So now I only have my goat. The silver lining to this story is that I will be able to get my goat pregnant again soon and I will be able to know what to do with the babies once they are born because I have already gone through it once. The rabbits are a sad story, but again, if I decide to breed rabbits again I will have a better understanding of what to do. I take this all as a chance to learn and it’s apart of my Peace Corps experience.