How Félicie came to his untimely end …

What happened before.

Somehow, Félicie had managed to follow my mother into the bathroom, which also holds the laundry machine, as well as a tall closet in which the laundry and cleaning liquids and powders were/are kept. Almost two days after Félicie had gone missing, my mother heard a thumping sound coming out of this closet. When she opened it, she saw the rabbit, fiercely banging his hind legs against one of the side walls.

For almost 36 hours the poor animal had been locked in there after my mother had unintentionally closed the door, not knowing that Félicie had been hiding behind one of the barrels of laundry powder. He seemed alright though and glad to be in the open again with water and food close at paw.

The next morning, however, my mother found Félicie lying on his side by the kitchen door, his little body trembling and shaking. His usually dark blue eyes had turned all red, like an albino rabbit’s. By the time the vet arrived, Félicie was already in rabbit heaven. The vet's diagnosis was very clear: Félicie had died from ‘food poisoning’. Remembering his recent overnight stay in the bathroom closet, we examined the barrels and bags of laundry powder in there. Very quickly our fears were confirmed; one of the plastic bag clearly showed teeth marks and some of the powder was lying on the floor around it.

Years later, while redecorating the kitchen, my parents found a large patch of wall behind a cupboard where the wallpaper had been meticulously stripped. This left them slightly puzzled … until they remembered Félicie, the rabbit that on long winter evenings would spent quality time under that particular cupboard producing intriguing shredding sounds. At the time they didn’t know what it was, but seeing the stripped patch they realized that even a house-trained rabbit will always be a rodent.