Our $500 Bunny

After our car had sat idle in our driveway for several days, we decided to do some shopping in Temecula and get gas. So off we go and only a mile from home we noticed a new, different colored cluster of service warnings. We decided this must be an automatic warning, based on mileage. But just to make sure, we called the dealer – who said we needed to come in.

The car was taken to the service bay at about 11:15 a.m. The first word back from the shop was “you gotta see this.” So Claudia follows the mechanics back to the car, where she was told to look under the hood, forward of the engine and at the lowest part of the engine compartment below the fan.

There in the lower splash shield quietly lay a terrorized cottontail rabbit from our yard. The mechanics could not entice or scare the bunny to come out the space through which he (or she) entered, so a partial disassembly was required.

The bunny was carefully removed and put into a suitable box with lots of air holes and placed in the car trunk. The bunny had gnawed through some wiring and on a wheel speed sensor harness, having lived inside the splash shield for days.

By the time Claudia went to pay the almost $500 bill at 5 p.m., the entire staff at Paradise knew all about the bunny in the car. The bunny was returned to our yard and within a couple of nights we saw two rabbits eating grass in our tiny front yard, one of which had to be our $500 bunny rabbit.

John Watson