It's important to make sure your kids know how to treat your animals. Many parents know that kids need to be reminded several times on how we touch animals (gently) or when it's time to keep their little one away from the dog if it seems like they might be about to play too roughly. But for one parent, they're worried that his or her partner's son is going to pet their rabbit to "death" and wants advice on how to teach him to be gentle.
As the worried parent explained, the partner's 4-year-old son loves the pet rabbit a little too much.
In a letter written to Slate's Care and Feeding advice column, the anonymous stepparent wrote that no matter how much they've explained it to the boy how he needs to play with the pet, he never seems to listen.
"We have tried explaining that he needs to be gentle with the rabbit: Stroking is OK, but grabbing is not. Neither is chasing the rabbit around the house," the person wrote. "And picking him up by the ears, which we found him doing again yesterday, is completely forbidden."
"After we found him holding the poor dangling rabbit by the ears, we got angry and my partner tried to put him in timeout," the person continued. "This just resulted in a lot of very loud screaming."
At a loss, the letter writer doesn't know what else to do to protect the rabbit. "I am seriously considering finding him a new home, but I was hoping perhaps you might have some alternative suggestions," the worried pet owner wrote. "How can you teach a small, boisterous child to be gentle with pets?"
The advice columnist had one strong piece of advice: keep bunny away from the kid.
Columnist Nicole Cliffe recommended that the letter writer get the bun a child-proof cage and ban him from playing with the rabbit unless supervised by an adult.
"Some little kids just lose their whole dang minds around pets, and it’s a lot easier to limit his access than to try to reason him into getting his act together," she reasoned. "Protect the bun!"
Online, other people had some advice on what the letter writer could do to keep the bunny safe.
One person shared that when they had this problem with their own daughter, they also had to keep her away from the family pet. "Every time she whined or cried, I'd wait her out and explain how easy it was to injure the bunny, and that we needed to protect her from injury all the time," the commenter wrote. "That was our job as a pet owner. She was not allowed to open the cage (I bought a better one with a double lock), but she could help feed bunny carrots every couple of days. "
"Young children should never be left unsupervised with animals," another person wrote. "4-year-olds have very little impulse control."
And someone else thought that the problem might go away on its own. "Rabbits bite. It shouldn't take too long for the rabbit and the toddler to negotiate a truce, unless your partner's kid is a psychopath," the commenter wrote.
Others were just straight-up judgmental.
"The rabbit letter is confusing to me," one person commented. "Like couldn't you have thought of locking the cage, or moving it somewhere where the kid can't get to it on your own?"
"Who's in charge here, that child or the adults?" wrote someone else. "If the adults are in charge then act like it. A four yr old understands no and can be given a time out. Ignore the crying. Buy the rabbit a cage and start keeping it in the cage when the child is there and only allow the kid to touch the rabbit with supervision. This really isn't that hard."
And someone else agreed that the parents need to buck up. "Either the bunny, or the 4-year-old, or the grownups run the household," the person commented. "Just a hint: it's usually a good idea if an adult human runs the household."
