Birds chatter a lot. Budgies, canaries, and finches make constant small sounds; there is no peace and quiet. And the bigger a bird is, the bigger its voice. Medium-sized parrots and larger will yell when their favorite person leaves the room, to remind you to come back and make sure you are still okay. They will yell when you are in the room and they would like attention. Your ears will hurt.
In the last place I lived, a semi-detached house, the neighbours on the other side had two teenaged boys, and lovebirds (I think).
We almost never heard mom, dad, or boys, but the birds ... the birds we could hear through the shared wall, constantly!
GuitarStv, that sounds ghastly! How do the cats survive the cold, though?
Many of them don't. Those that do will often show severe injury from frostbite. I like animals, and it deeply disturbs me when people refuse to take personal responsibility for their pets in this manner.
Agreed.
We spent all summer catching rabbits - an original three domestic rabbits that had gradually been left to fend for themselves in an urban location, including over a (Canadian!) winter. And their offspring. Multiple litters. By the time we managed to catch all the babies, some of them had started to hit maturity as well.
The final two that we caught had serious injuries. One, quite clearly had been in the grip of a predator - probably the adult coyote we'd seen hanging around in the park behind our street, or maybe its babies learning to hunt. Francis, as we named him after my nephew (didn't know if it was a boy or girl, so could have been Frances or Francis), had infected puncture wounds on the top and bottom of his head. The second, Mulberry (because a bunch of the others had been given "berry" names at the Humane Society, and we have a mulberry tree in the backyard) had botfly larvae in her neck, and the site had become badly infected.
Having got to identify the bunnies by their markings, there were at least 3 others that "disappeared" in their first few months of life, either died of illness or predation, or possibly rescued by someone else, though I didn't see anyone else trying to catch them. And my strong suspicion is the coyote, who was spotted more and more often the more rabbits were around, and hasn't been seen since, once we got them all caught.
All of the rabbits but one have now been adopted out by the wonderful rescue groups that took them off our hands. The one that is left is the original mom, who after having at least 4-5 litters back to back, has been left with serious health issues. She's being well cared for at the Toronto Humane Society, but none of this was fair to her, and she deserves a caring home of her own.
So, a little info about domestic rabbits who are wondering if they might be good mustachian pets - they require specialized vet care, because most regular dog and cat vets won't touch them. They need much larger cages than most people realize, and outside of cage time every day to run around the house. They chew, a lot sometimes. They breed young, and repeatedly, but they also strongly need other rabbit companionship, so they absolutely need to be spayed or neutered.
They are the 3rd most abandoned pets, after dogs and cats. Which tells you that you shouldn't get one lightly...
