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Beyond Dominance and Affection: Living
with Rabbits in Post-Humanist Households
Julie Ann Smith
ABSTRACT
In June 2002, Subaru aired a television commercial showing a
mother and daughter driving into the woods to "free" a pet
rabbit. The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Animals (ASPCA) and the House Rabbit Society (HRS) promptly
protested, arguing that domestic rabbits are the result of human
intervention and cannot survive by themselves in the wild. The
implied discursive contest over the rabbit in this
commercialwas it being "set free" or "abandoned"?foregrounds a
troubling tension. This conflict may be particularly acute
because of the species in question. Rabbits cannot roam freely
within a human house in quite the way a dog or cat can. This
essay attempts to address this ambivalence through both argument
and memoir.
As a member of the House Rabbit Society (HRS) who has rescued
200 rabbits and lived with them in my house, I want to live with
rabbits as companion animals, including protecting them. But I
also worry that this entails considerable subjugation.
However, the condition of the domestic lives of rabbits can
speak to our concerns about companion animals of other species.
On the one hand, we very much want to think of them as "free."
On the other, we are disturbed by cultural messages and personal
intuitions that companion animals are considerably compromised.
It begins by locating my own concerns within a larger cultural
anxiety, which I believe the June 2002 Suburu commercial
exploited. It goes on to describe the ways in which I misread
the goal of the HRS as an attempt to create the human house as
an arena of "freedom" for rabbits. It concludes that when the
egalitarian model failed, I came to understand that the HRS
offered something richly different from either paternalism or a
fiction about freedom and equality. I propose to call this a
"performance ethics." Part of what I mean by this is acceptance
that domestic animals will never be equal partners to humans
only because they live in arrangements for another species. But
I also mean attentive provision of opportunities for animal
agency and recognition that animals actively utilize these to
perform their own natures.
I understand that many human beings do not find problematic the
relationship between domestic animals and humans. To them,
animals thrive when a benevolent human is in charge. But another
side of me finds domestication vexing. It seems to imply a
natural right of humans to manage nonhuman animals. It minimizes
the agency of animals in the animal-human relationship.
One might trace our present uncertainties about "pet keeping"
back to Yi-Fu Tuan (1984), who argued that human affection for
"pets" is inseparable from dominance, that the pleasure of
dominanceand even the impossibility of intimate relationships
without itlies deep within the human psyche. From this, he
writes, follows the motivation for human creation of pets.
According to Tuan, such dominance is evidenced in various ways:
Breeding satisfies human aesthetic whim at the expense of animal
health, castration uses painful appliances, and obedience
training succeeds only through the display of unchallengeable
human power. Further, Tuan describes exhibition of animals in
shows, as "demonstrat[ing] openly and to public applause the
power to dominate and humble another being" (p. 107). These
"refined cruelties" service human identity by enabling
self-images of power, Tuan maintained, and provide an acceptable
outlet for impulses that otherwise might be directed toward
humans. Since Tuan's study, feminist theorythat has exposed
paternalism as domination in disguisesurely has complicated the
concern about domination over companion animals.
Some strains of contemporary culture go even farther than Yi-Fu
Tuan (1984), often expressing contempt for the "pet." Valorizing
the wild, the free, the actively predatory, environmentalism and
postmodernism view domestic animals as tame, denatured, and
subjugated. Aggressive, public declarations of scorn for "pets"
are common on television and radio. A proposed name change from
"pet owner" to "pet guardian" in official documents in Los
Angeles recently unleashed disdain for "pets" during a comedy
show on national public radio. Commentators described pets as
slaves who are being reconfigured as fuzzy people, and they
declared that animals are either free or they are pets (Rewind,
2002). At the same time, as more humans feel free to insist on
the "humanity" of their companion animals, they feel more
tension between the presumption of equality and the ways they
actually live with animals. Ultimately, what this essay
addresses is whether we might construct a "useful fiction" about
our relationship to companion animals based on neither equality
nor paternalism. I propose a "performance ethics," which will
both celebrate the human desire to dismantle the boundary
between humans and companion animals and acknowledge its
difficulty.
Re-imagining the Rabbit
To look more deeply at the possibility of egalitarian relations,
I would like to describe the HRS’s extraordinary act of
re-imagining the rabbit as a companion animal. I was deeply
attracted to the material and discursive practices of the HRS,
at least in part because I saw it as enacting a view of rabbits
as free and equal to humans within the domestic setting. But as
the descriptions below will suggest, what was going on was
really quite different, more creative.
The HRS was founded in California in 1988 by Marinell Harriman
and others. Harriman had written and published the House Rabbit
Handbook in 1985 and started The House Rabbit Journal in May
1988. These two publications established the goals of the
society and important features of its discourse. Articles about
rabbit behavior were authored primarily by Harriman and Amy
Shapiro Espie, the behavior editor of the journal. I was the
founder of the Wisconsin chapter of the HRS and chapter manager
in Wisconsin from 1993 until 1999. From 1993 until the present,
I have lived in my house with multiple rabbits at a time, most
of whom were taken from animal shelters and eventually adopted
out in accord with the mission of HRS.
One reason I found it easy to think about rabbits as free and
equal within the human house was that I took them, not from the
wild, but from oppressive domestic circumstances, often the
outdoor hutch. To me, the outdoor hutch was the icon of human
control over the rabbit because of its failure to address rabbit
needs for space, companionship, and protection and also because
of its association with practices of the American Rabbit
Breeders Association (ARBA), summarized in the ARBA slogan
"Food, Fur, and Fancy." The move to the house was an act of
rescuing rabbits from being raised and killed for food and fur
and from being treated in most of the ways described by Tuan
(1984) as "fancy": forced mating, breeding, exhibiting, and
judging. The Society eschewed nearly all the practices mentioned
by Tuan as indicators of dominance. It did not engage in
breeding; members privately parodied ARBA “standards of
perfection” by celebrating such physical features in rabbits as
airplane ears and messy spots. It forbade adopters to exhibit
their rabbits. Taken from these traditional contexts, rabbits
who entered the HRS house seemed to be entering an arena of
freedom. As long as I was rescuing rabbits, I had no doubt that
I was freeing them.
Once rescued, rabbits had to be controlled within the house, but
the Society managed control issues that it could not solve
materially by discursive means. For example, it recognized that
rabbits are destructive and that chewing and digging in the
house are dangerous for the rabbit and damaging to human
dwellings. Rather than discard the cage, it revised the concept
of a cage in this new setting. If the move indoors meant moving
the hutch indoors, and if these structures still looked to the
observer like animal cages, members of HRS saw them as the
rabbit's own space within the human house. Redesigned and
renamed, cages were elaborated with multiple levels and ramps
and called condos; many were pens made large enough so that
humans could enter to visit the rabbit in "his space" (Figure
1). All were places of limited confinement, at least much less
than that of the outdoor hutch. These modifications gave rabbits
more freedom. Additionally, the discourse surrounding these
practices focused on controlling humans rather than rabbits,
because humans were the ones having to radically alter their
behavior.
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Figure 1 about here
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Not surprisingly, management of rabbit sexuality engaged very
serious and difficult issues about control. Unaltered rabbits
untiringly will spray the premises, their friends, and
competitors with strong-smelling urine. They often spray while
running or shaking, creating an arc of urine that can cover many
feet. I lived with one briefly unaltered male, "The General,"
who could spray all four walls of a room at once and who
regularly sprayed me. His capacitybut not his behaviorwas
exceptional. The HRS and its veterinarians went to extraordinary
lengths to educate other veterinarians to castrate rabbits
safely and humanely, including administering pain medication
after surgery. Less than10 years ago, some veterinarians in
Madison, Wisconsin were still castrating males by agricultural
methods, that is, by tying rubber bands around their testicles.
Even if the result is the same, the HRS approach to neutering
suggests a very different attitude toward managing rabbit
sexuality from the one exposed by Tuan (1984),
Because neutering, no matter how gently done, is an act of
considerable control, the HRS also needed to manage it
discursively. Espie, who wrote the HRS’s official statement on
spaying and neutering (1988, pp. 4-5), not surprisingly
represented spaying and neutering as better for the animals. In
this, she was assisted by rabbit biology: Spaying can extend the
life of females for years, because they are susceptible to
uterine pathology. Thus, spaying was viewed as medical
intervention. But she also argued that it reduced suffering by
preventing the birth of unwanted rabbits. In order to understand
this argument as something other than an easy answer to animal
population control, one must understand that we personally
witnessed death and the effects of abuse and neglect on many
occasions. I viewed neutering as a way to control people who
caused these tragedies: professional breeders, amateur
hobbyists, and misguided parents. I viewed these humans as
appropriating the animal body for their own purposes while
ignoring the predictable effects: human-instigated death of
countless rabbits. I used neutering to control these people, not
animal populations. When I had a female rabbit spayed, I was
relieved that she could never be used as someone's breeding
project with all that might entail for her, such as being
replaced by one of her offspring or treated as a commodity.
Because male animals could be vasectomized, castration also is
done to modify animal behavior to suit humans rather than to
control populations. But the Society must promote spaying and
neutering to fulfill its mission to find rabbit adopters who
might not otherwise be willing to live with rabbits. I do not
believe, as some have maintained, that those of us who arrange
these surgeries do so to purify or infantalize the animal body.
In many other areas, we are not squeamish about bodily function.
Rabbits pass their food twice, the first time consuming their
feces directly. We see this every day. Additionally, we nurse
rabbits with digestive problems by inoculating them with gut
bacteria obtained from the feces of healthy rabbits. We prepare
a "fecal cocktail," which is syringe-fed to the sick rabbit.
Also, many altered rabbits will continue to mount. I recall one
early morning when I prepared my class lecture on Book I of
Spenser's The Faerie Queene (Holinesse) while a young male
rabbit indefatigably chased and mounted the cat around my chair.
Rather than being disturbed, I congratulated myself on living in
two interesting worlds.
Espie (1996) addressed the control question of spaying and
neutering by framing the discussion in terms of "naturalness
versus unnaturalness" and then deconstructing the idea of
"natural." She argued that "naturalness" was a vague term that
does not apply to the home environment, which is "unnatural" for
rabbits. Once one accepts the unnatural as a new kind of
naturalness, one no longer confuses the issue by evaluating
behavior in terms of wild animals. By making castration the
natural choice for rabbits living in the human home, Espie
mitigated it as an act of control. Rather, it became human
assistance in giving rabbits more freedom of movement and
expression within the environments in which they, per force,
found themselves. Neutering became a compromise to the
human-rabbit relationship that humans, admittedly, forced upon
rabbits but reciprocated by different kinds of their own
compromises.
The HRS did not simply manage difficult issues of control
discursively. In fact, its members surrendered enormous control
over their homes. Many HRS members "rabbit-proofed" their
houses, a playful word that euphemized extensive modifications.
In my own house, rabbit-proofing meant that most of the
furniture was made of metal, electrical cords were fastened
behind furniture or covered in hard plastic or metal tubing, and
protective wood strips were tacked on to wood baseboards and
wood trim around closets and windows. In addition, linoleum
replaced carpetor the carpet was abandoned to shreddingand
fencing enclosed bookcases. So-called "litterbox training"
primarily meant capitalizing on the rabbit habit of urinating
consistently in one or two places. We simply put litterboxes
where the rabbits decided to eliminate. Many of us found it
easier to change ourselves than the premises. At present, the
rabbit who lives in the bedroom is excavating my mattress. She
bounces around inside the dust cover and chews the wooden frame
around the metal springs. Because of the HRS, I know I could
staple hardware cloth around the bottom of the mattress or I
could buy a large cardboard box sold for shipping mattresses and
put it under the bed with materials in it for her to shred.
Probably I will do neither. Indeed, I have heard HRS members
laugh about taking turns with their human partners sleeping on
the wet spot in the bed; putting fencing around their beds at
night to keep rabbits from urinating on their pillow or
barbering their eyebrows; and catering to rabbits who nip
ankles, box hands, or trip-up human bodies when caretakers are
too slow with the treats. Frankly, I love this way of living,
this version of “becoming animal.” It was the genius of HRS
founder Harriman to naturalize this life, so that those of us
who came after felt social permission to live as we had always
wanted to.
Over time, we came to understand the principles of rabbit space
and changed our abodes even more. After many years of living
with rabbits, I noticed that they liked free corridors along
perimeters. Before this, I would dutifully place litterboxes and
toys along the walls of the playroom after I had cleaned each
day. By night, the room was a "mess." Eventually I noticed that
it was a particular kind of mess: Everything moveable in the
room was in the middle of the floor (Figure 2). This observation
changed forever the way I live in my house, as did my
understanding of other rabbit preferences: spaces along borders
and boundaries, enclosed spaces with more than one exit, spaces
that allow them to see out but not be seen. Rabbit ideas of
space management often conflicted with my own aesthetics, but I
came to value them as indicators that rabbits were making
themselves at home. Of course, as HRS members learned more about
rabbit ideas of space, they tried to give rabbits space that
imitated natural places. Often, these were called toys but
really were quite prominent "rabbit furniture." One Milwaukee
staff member wired apple branches to all of the legs of her
dining room chairs. Others offered sizeable equipment, such as
toddler playsets, ramps going to tabletops and window sills, and
"townhouses" made of cardboard boxes.
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Figure 2 about here
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Domestic rabbits are European rabbits who, unlike the North
American Cottontail, are highly social and who excavate
extensive underground tunnels and chambers (Figure 3). As a
response to this, HRS members gave rabbits excavation
opportunities within the homecardboard boxes and tubes stuffed
with paper or old bed sheets (Figure 4).
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Figure 3 about here
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Figure 4 about here-
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Additionally, no one in the HRS exercised explanatory control.
Excluded from interpretive certainty, HRS members were
encouraged, once they met the rabbits’ primary behavioral needs,
to remain flexible, open-minded, and modest about their
understandings of rabbit behavior. This meant that intellectual
appropriation was much less possible. Discourse on rabbit
behavior addressed practical problems such as aggression. In
spite of having many members with graduate degrees, the Society
had little interest in theorizing rabbit behavior with academic
models that might authorize a particular view. Harriman (1994)
and Espie (1996) created an entire discourse to talk about
rabbit behavior while deferring human explanatory authority.
They often used anthropomorphisms playfully, as do many
postmodern novelists who write about animals. They also used
discussion of behavior to communicate a deep valuing of the
animals rather than to explain them. Also, Harriman unfailingly
deflected attempts to make her the center of interpretative
power by directing attention back to the rabbits as beings quite
capable of conveying who they were in their own ways. I believe
that this attitude made psychological space for the
animalimpossible in highly controlled arrangements with humans
whose views are fixed, confidant, and authoritative.
In other major, minor, practical, and discursive ways did HRS
members express their vision of shared space. Interaction with
rabbits was presented as best happening on the floor. While the
human lay quietly, the rabbit would investigate, groom, climb
and sit on the human, and allow him/herself to be petted. In
this way, rabbits were given freedom to initiate interaction, a
key component of relational partnerships (Harker, Collis, &
McNicholas (2000, p. 191). Rabbit partners were highly
encouraged by the Society. Once rabbits had companions of their
own species, the human was decentered within their world. As
Espie (1996) expressed the case, "once you live with a bonded
pair or trio you will see that even the most devoted human
cannot quite fill the bill" (p. 4). And so, we even gave up
seeing the rabbits as exclusively "our" companions.
Creating Spaces
And so, why is all this not enough to make me feel that rabbits
are "free and equal" within the house where they live with me?
Perhaps I am oversensitive to the dynamics of human dominance.
Perhaps I recognize that we use some obfuscating discourse to
manage "control" issues for which we have no answers. Perhaps I
recoil at creating arrangements that make animals look
dependent, even though in other circumstances they could take
care of themselves perfectly well. Also, I am bothered by the
endless neutering surgeries even as I fully recognize their
necessity. I am unconvinced that castration is important only to
humans because only humans construct gender identity. I believe
it has profound hormonal effects, and I wonder if I am taking
away something from the rabbits--sexual pleasure? youth? the
ability to satisfy strong instincts? Ultimately, I am disturbed
because the rabbits cannot resist or reverse the conditions of
their lives. Also, my intuition tells me that domestication is
not a pure state of which animals are either in or out. Rather,
I think that animals must manage the disconnection between their
natures and their human surroundings.
Thus, I have come to contextualize my living arrangements not in
terms of ARBA and the rabbit hutch but in a more natural
setting, one that allows the rabbits to live outdoors in large
social groups. Some HRS members have created such spaces as the
only way to rescue domestic rabbits who have been "dumped" (as
in the Subaru commercial), have connected with other discarded
rabbits, and have bred into large colonies that humans have
decided to eliminate (Ackerman, 2002). The HRS, however, does
not view these as the most desirable places for rabbits, because
the rabbits are exposed to many more dangers, including
fighting, injury, and predation. So the problem is one of
domesticity itself. Also, the HRS wants to put rabbits in close
contact with humans, with the hope of changing human
perceptions.
Because I expected to live with rabbits on a free and equal
basis, I was dissatisfied with my arrangements. Other people
have addressed the need to understand our relations to domestic
animals differently, and these ideas were very helpful. As Baker
(2002) has said so well, we live inexpertly with animals, and
the task must be approached with an experimental attitude, a
willingness to get it wrong most of the time (p. 188). In her
article on Foucault and animals, Palmer (2001) points out that
not all kinds of dominance are alike:
The idea of a “regime of inequality” masks so many different
forms of power relationship (which may be all unequal but are
unequal in a multitude of ways) that it is more interesting to
look as Foucault suggests at particular contexts and
micropractices between humans and animal bodies. (p. 353)
Such an approach might distinguish between a paternalism that
instantiates control from a paternalism that attempts to make
the best of already compromised situations for the animals.
Finally, one might view animal-human relations within the human
house from another conceptual framework, one enacted by the HRS
and called by me a "performance ethics."
By this, I mean a way of thinking about the disorderly
lived-relations I have with rabbits by means of a mental
construction that is, itself, messy, even oxymoronic. "Ethics"
suggests a code of moral values toward others based on reliable
knowledges about their needs and desires, while "performance"
relaxes these strictures by gesturing toward imperfect acts
based on uncertain understandings. The “ethics” of “performance
ethics” contributes a sense of responsibility and suggests that
some behaviors are better than other behaviors. In my opinion,
those are ones that make physical and mental space for animal
agency. “Ethics” does not suggest that the rabbits participate
in this ethical framework, although I am not willing to say that
they do not have some sense of duty toward others.
But the problem of ethics is not only that it implies a rather
strict, joyless understanding of my relation to rabbits. It also
fails to tell me whether the more ethical act is to decline
living with rabbits because they will not be free or to accept
the domestic framework that entails my control of them. The
"performance" part of performance ethics is intended to
discompose, enrich, and lighten a burdensome and unhelpful sense
of moral responsibility communicated by "ethics." Performance
applies both to how I see my own behavior and that of my rabbits
and refers to a playful, experimental, tentative sense of who we
are in relationship to each. Performance assumes that rabbit
behavior is intentional and varied. It communicates that rabbit
actions reflect something about them to which they have access,
even though I may not know what this is or how they process it.
In other words, "performance" corrects the idea of animals as a
blank materiality that needs the human mind to be meaningful. I
borrow here what Butler (1999) has said about nature in another
context, that is, that nature is degraded as "that which is
'before' intelligibility, in need of the mark, if not the mar,
of the social to signify, to be known, to acquire value" (p.
238). As in Butler's "nature," animal nature too often is
thought to have a neutral relationship to meaning that must be
corrected by the human intellect.
Because "performance" speaks to actions rather than to
explanations, it opens a place for intuitions about the meanings
of what animals do by withholding judgment. I would like the
word to refer to my pre-cognitive knowledges that I cannot yet
express. Accounts of "pet" behavior necessarily seems trite and
unreliable because language is not up to the task of
representing the impact that animal acts have on us, the
devotion toward animals that they generate. Trust in pre-verbal
intuitions fills that gap. I begin to intuit meaning in animal
acts by being attentive to the limitations of my own
perceptions. As I said above, for many years I lived with the
incomprehensibility of rabbit "interior decorating." Rabbits
insisted on creating specific kinds of space that were not my
kinds. Because I did not understand them, rabbit behavior seemed
mindless. Once I gathered the now-obvious point that they
enacted a desire for safe spaces, they suddenly became much
smarter. However, I do not want to over-read rabbit actions. One
way to avoid this might be to understand animal performances as
expressing multiple truths about them that are always
provisional, open to revision; the point is not which
interpretation is right but that meaning is there in some form.
Also, I can participate in the HRS’s discourse on rabbits. For
me, the HRS is an epistemological community that produces
knowledges from unstructured conversations: Among different
representations of rabbit acts, some are reiterated, some
quietly disappear.
I want a concept for the way I see rabbits that conveys that
they have options, make behavioral choices. When I acquired my
first rabbit, I puzzled over how he knew to use the water-bottle
sipper, since nothing in the natural environment of rabbits
would correlate to this device. About 12 years later, when I
lived with rooms filled with cages of foster rabbits, all had
water crocks. I decided one day to replace the crocks with tube
sippers, which I did all at once. What I saw was many different
responses to the sipper. Some rabbits grabbed it with their
teeth and shook it, some licked the spout up and down, and some
batted it with their paws; eventually, all figured out how to
use it. I would call these actions “performances” in that the
rabbits had a range of possible responses to their experience
and selected one or more.
Once I start to think of rabbit activities as performances
rather than as behavior, I exchange a fixed set of activities
that must all be given play for open-ended possibilities. If one
performance is not possible within the setting, others will take
its place. One reasons that the HRS knows so much about what
rabbits do because its rabbits are not spending time
reproducing. Thus, the performance model provides a possible
solution to the spay and neutering problem, as Espie (1988)
understood. She argued that the sacrifice of one kind of natural
behavior can enable another: "because the animals were not
neutered they must now be kept separate. The choice here is not
between natural and unnatural but between two sets of natural
behaviors" (p. 5). To understand her point fully, one needs to
know that rabbit-rabbit relationships are more stable and
peaceful if both animals are altered. Thus, spaying and
neutering affords the animals a chance to express potentialities
that would not otherwise come into play.
Crucial to my performance ethics is seeing rabbit actions as
transactional, done to elicit responses from audiences. Rabbits
replicate each other's behaviors. If one rabbit begins grooming
him/herself in a room full of rabbits, very shortly the majority
may be grooming themselves. Harriman (1994) videotaped a rabbit
instigating "popcorn hops" among a group of rabbits. One rabbit
began making these sudden, vertical bursts upward, and others
soon responded in kind. Performance ethics values animal actions
as signifying or enacting relationship. I remember one special
performance that I was drawn into by a rabbit named Hattie. She
and her partner lived in the laundry room in my basement, which
has shelves built into the wall and ramps leading up to them.
One evening I was tidying the area, and I accidently dropped the
rabbits' large water crock. Having just filled it, I was
exasperated by the crash, the flood of water, and the shards of
broken pottery everywhere. I cleaned the mess and fetched
another crock, which I filled and set on the top shelf. I walked
away for a moment, then turned to retrieve the crock and watched
frozen and horrified as Hattie ran up the ramp and pushed it off
the shelfcausing another huge crash and mess. To my mind, this
was an example of Hattie’s seeing my behavior as a performance,
as an act directed toward her, and enacting a response. As I
said, rabbits often replicate each other's acts. They also
appear to love to make noise by throwing objects around. Still,
I was astounded that Hattie treated me like a rabbit. Her act
brought me to see us in a relationship as she might see it. Even
though each of us experienced the interaction differently, it
gestured toward a cross-species form of communication that I
deeply valued.
My rabbits execute actions all the time that convey their
understanding that they are in a relationship of some kind with
me. They constantly shove their noses under my hands to demand
petting. I have seen them work out relationships among
themselves in ways I would call extended performance: endless
marking, bodily postures, directed gesturesall designed to
produce a response that will elicit a counter response, which
will be modified to evoke a slightly different response. When
the rabbit Rose sometimes runs circles around my chair before
she flops down beside it, she performs her recognition of our
relationship by referencing the ancient ways of rabbit courting.
Does she see me as her partner, and, if so, what does
partnership mean to her? Has she borrowed an act from another
context to express something about the two of us here and now?
Rather than providing answers to these questions, performance
ethics implies that animals may understand their own actions in
ways that human language cannot represent. As Fudge (2002)
wrote,
[o]ur language creates and gives meaning to our world, and
animals become subsumed into that world because we lack another
language with which to represent them. The choice, as I see it,
is a simple one: we acknowledge the limitations of our own
perspective, but simultaneously accept that what we can achieve
with those limitations is important and worthwhile, even if it
is only the best that we can do. . . . We must have in our minds
the fact that our perception is based upon our limitations, and
the fact that their lives exceed our abilities to think about
them. (pp. 159-160)
Even when rabbit activity is not directed toward me, I often
think of it as a performance between us. One might say that I
imagine our separate actions playfully and extravagantly. When I
feel Mattie bouncing around inside the mattress, I am amused by
a mental representation of her and me performing a preposterous,
post-humanist version of the princess and the pea. Of course, my
thoughts are exclusively human. But this imagining directs my
attention toward the positive recognition that we share close
spaces and our lives, which we connect in unconventional and
unpredictable ways. Also, although Mattie's engagement with the
mattress has nothing to do with meI do not read her act as
creating a "nest" for usI take great pleasure in knowing that I
have played a role in giving her excavation opportunities. Thus,
I think of what we each do separately as a performance between
us, even though I have used my human imagination to see it that
way.
For other reasons, I like thinking about my own behavior toward
the rabbits as performance. It makes me see what I do as a
series of open-ended episodes that can be revised rather than as
acts to be forever judged in terms of a fixed standard. It
allows for increasingly enriched interactions, as the animals
and I develop intuitions about each other's natures. It
acknowledges that they have a point of view toward me that is
more important than the rules that I may devise for myself. It
fosters the perception of relationship, ultimately the only cure
for human anxieties about companion animals. In sum, it allows
me to have a committed life with rabbits without anxieties about
dominance and freedom. It does this by providing me with a
conceptually messy mix of uncertainties about who rabbits
areintuitions I trust but cannot prove and often cannot even
explain“facts” agreed upon by members of a human community with
whom I share experience with rabbits and playful (and wholly
human) representations that the rabbits do not share but that
affect my behavior toward them.
"Performance ethics" has served me well as a more practical,
more positive framework with which to think about my
relationships to rabbits than dominance or freedom. I realize
that all along, thanks to the HRS, this is what I have been
living.
Notes
* Julie Smith, University of Wisconsin
References
Ackerman, S. (September 2002). "Sands of time! Rabbit meadows
sanctuary update." Washington House Rabbit News, 11 (3), 10-11.
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Figure Legend
Figure 1. Indoor rabbit pen in HRS adoptive home. Madison,
Wisconsin. 1995. (Photograph by the author.)
Figure 2. Rabbit playroom at Wisconsin HRS foster home. Madison,
Wisconsin. 1997. (Photograph by the author.)
Figure 3. Entrance to underground tunnels and chambers in
indoor/outdoor rabbit facility. New Glarus, Wisconsin. 1994.
(Photograph by the author.)
Figure 4. Cardboard tunnels and boxes for excavation; Wisconsin
HRS foster home. Madison, Wisconsin. 1998. (Photograph by the
author.)
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