“Spice-ing” up life around here

Almost every evening I look outside my kitchen window and see a sight that would make anyone smile. It is the peculiar relationship between my rabbit, Spice, and her best friends the sheep.

Spice arrived in our life this summer while Sean and I were driving across the United States to move to his families ranch. We stopped in Denver to spend the night with a friend and ended up walking away with more than what we bargained for. I have always loved animals, so when my friend showed me her two rabbits I couldn’t help but fall in love. That evening they convinced me to bring the two little hoppers to the ranch, since they were in the process of moving. The only problem was, there was absolutely NO room in the car, so for the next 12 hours the two new additions to the ranch were in a box under my feet in the only space available. Despite the tight squeeze we had a blast with the little rabbits, every time we would go to rest stop and come back the two critters were in the drivers seat or on the dashboard. None the less, it made for an exciting last leg of the trip. Sugar and Spice were quite a pair but unfortunately  Sugar didn’t make it too long in the big west, but Spice has exceeded our expectations.

This is not the first time that Spice has made friends with sheep, in fact it seems to be her favorite past-time. When we first brought her to the ranch she spent some time with a bummer lamb (a lamb that is being bottle fed) that we had. The bummer lamb would chase Spice around and Spice would sprint circles around the lamb. Both of them would spend hours together jumping around and playing, but eventually we had to keep Spice more locked up because she would start testing her boundaries to the point it was really hard to catch her.

We eventually let Spice out into the wild since she had escaped a couple times but would always stick around the area. Now she likes to spend the evenings with the sheep behind the house. Most times I’ll see her jumping up and down off the sheep as they try to relax, but Spice makes that quite difficult for them.

The sheep seem to enjoy her company, especially the lambs.

Even the cats enjoy her company. Typically the cats will stalk Spice around and pounce, but this rabbit seems to be smarter than the cats and the dogs.

We have a blast with Spice and couldn’t imagine our little ranch without her.