Number 74 of Things No One Ever Tells You About Rural Living

You will have to scrape dead things off the road in front of your house.

A few months ago, it was a rat. A completely flat rat. This morning, it was something bigger and cuter than a rat.

Peter's workshop student arrived and asked him if we had a kitten. When Peter answered in the negative, she informed him that there was a dead kitten on the road just outside the gate.

I was working from home today, so I grabbed some garbage bags and a shovel. Somehow, in the divvying up of chores in our relationship, I was tasked with dead animal removal.

I was relieved when I realised that the poor little dead thing was not a kitten. It was a wild rabbit. I don't know if it should matter, but it's easier for me to see a dead wild animal than a dead domestic animal. I feel a bigger sense of responsibility for domestic animals and it's also far too easy to imagine the human family that will miss them.

I'm no CSI forensics investigator, but it looked like the rabbit had about one or two more bunny hops before it would have found freedom in our hedge. Instead, it was hit in the back end. I won't go into gory detail because I know not everyone appreciates that sort of thing, but it looked like a science project. I used to dissect goldfish when I was a kid, so there's something fascinating to me about seeing anatomical structures.

But I couldn't dawdle. I was painfully aware that a car tearing around the curve could easily hit me the same way one had hit the rabbit. A minute later, I had the bunny corpse bundled in three layers of Hefty bags and he was given a solemn burial in the bin, with a later removal to the Civic Amenity Centre.