Sir Saffron Goes A-wooing: Happy at Last

When we left our handsome friend Sir Saffron back in March, he was hoping to find a new companion to lighten his existence (insofar as a spoiled rotten bunny’s existence needs lightening!) He met with some very handsome young ladies, as we saw in part one; though each of them was charming, none was quite right. It was time to go forth and meet some more damsels.

So Sir Saffron decided to hold an afternoon reception and invite all the fairest young bunny maidens to attend…well, really, foster bunny mom Terry from the House Rabbit Network actually brought three young ladies to meet Saffron at our house. With two of them, it was clear that a relationship would not work. But with the third…

Well, it was quite a different story. Sir Saffron and Miss Beans were clearly interested from the start. Picture Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle eyeing each other across the Meryton Assembly Rooms in Pride and Prejudice and you’ll get the idea. There was a great deal of sniffing and a lot of Saffron following the lovely girl bunny with amazing ears (she can let them flop down, or hold them almost upright) around the room as she explored…and then it started: the binkying. For those of you who do not speak Rabbit, I’ll explain: when a rabbit is very happy, it dances, leaps vertically up and does mid-air twists, shakes its head, and otherwise gambols about. This is called binkying…and when both Saffron and Beans started doing little jetés as they lolloped about the room, we knew this was it.

Miss Beans, who now goes by the name Beatrice (though we can’t help sometimes calling her the Beanie Baby!) moved in a few days later. According to her foster mom she was very, very grumpy during the interval, and Saffron himself seemed a little off. When we brought her in and set her in the temporary pen in the living room that she would stay in till she got used to the house (and until we were sure she and Saffron would be friends), she sniffed about nervously at first…until Saffron came into the room. For the next hour and a half he ran in circles around her pen, binkying…and when we let her out to interact with him, this happened: That's Beatrice presenting to Saffron...basically saying, "Take me, I'm yours!" And that's Saffron grooming the top of her head, basically saying, "Oh! Okay."

In a couple of days, we had this: So I think it's safe to say that for this little story, there is a very definite ending: and they lived happily (and hoppily) ever after.

Sir Saffron Goes A-wooing

I’m about to embark on another non-19th century, non-historical, personal post…but I can’t resist putting a historical spin on it, just for fun.

Sir Saffron Bunny Doyle, a beautiful French lop, is resident lagomorph in the Doyle household. Poor Sir Saffron lost his sister and dear companion, Miss Asuka Bunny Doyle, last year to a sudden infection and has been alone ever since, with no one to snuggle or nibble his parsley with. (That's Asuka giving Saffron nuzzles above.) And so the human members of the Doyle household thought that it might be time to find Sir Saffron a new companion.

It started out with a visit to the House Rabbit Network, a New England foster-home based shelter for rabbits. Might they have a young lady bunny looking for her happily-ever-after in the form of a handsome lop-eared boy and a bunny-crazy family? Well, it seems there just might be…

The first young lady we met was Carlotta, a charming, buxom miss…Then there was the lovely Dallas, definitely Miss Personality...And then there were Powder and Cloud, a pair of adorable fluffy white spinsters… What to do? Well, obviously, introduce our diffident young bachelor to these eligible ladies. Since Almack’s is not yet open for the season, we opted for meetings at the home of the HRN’s president, who is a noted bunny matchmaker. And the results?

Alas, Miss Dallas was a complete non-starter, as sparks flew between her and Sir Saffron…and not of the romance novel, destined-to-be-together kind. Miss Carlotta definitely seemed interested in him, though his interest was less clear. By the time we came to introducing Misses Powder and Cloud, poor Sir Saffron was not in the best of moods…but that didn’t stop these misses from taking a very marked interest in him, as you can see!

The results? Inconclusive…but these affairs of the heart take time. Another meeting is definitely indicated, perhaps over tea and carrot cake, and then we shall see if Sir Saffron might find a new companion to snuggle with. Or maybe two. Stay tuned...