You can't make this sh*t up

I didn't see this one coming.

I was in the backyard mowing, and I noticed that Scout was extremely interested in my potatoes. When I walked over to investigate, I saw this:

Do you know what that is? It's a rabbit nest in my potatoes!

So many things wrong with this picture: baby rabbits, in the garden, momma rabbit has breached the perimeter. What the hell am I supposed to do?

I can tell you what Scout wanted to do. It involved destroying everything between her and the bunnies, including my herbs.

Where there were once sage seedlings, there is now just dirt. Luckily, most of the thyme escaped unscathed.

At this point, I'm yelling and cussing (because I swear like a sailor), and I'm about to cry. The frustration is just so intense. There are rabbits in the garden. Scout has just killed a bunch of plants. I have to do something, and I don't like my options.

Here's the thing: I'm one of those bleeding heart animal lovers. I became a vegetarian at age 18. After 18 years of that, I started eating seafood, and I'm okay with that because I'm pretty sure I could kill a fish or a shrimp. But I can't kill fuzzy things.

My mind clearly isn't working well. My first thought is to set up a fence, so Scout can't climb into my herb box again. I pull out some fencing and some small poles I have in the shed, and I set up a barrier all around the herb box. Then I realize that momma rabbit probably climbed into the herb box and then through the fence, because the holes in the fence get bigger the farther you go up (it's a "rabbit guard" fence designed with small holes at ground level). That means my fence will keep her out, and the babies will die. I don't want dead rabbits in my potatoes.

If I want to save my potatoes and the rest of the garden, I know those babies have to go. There were times in my life when I would've let them stay and suffer the consequences, but the garden means more to me now. I planted that garden for a reason, and it wasn't to feed rabbits. So I harden my heart and I execute "operation bunny extraction". The nest was not very deep, and I was able to basically lift out a big pile of straw and bunny nest. I took them out of the backyard and put the whole pile in a flower bed. The poor little things hardly squirmed at all.

I'm not naïve enough to think that they have any chance of surviving, but at least I don't have to watch them get squeezed by a dog. I have a healthy dose of "out of sight, out of mind", and I'm relying on that and a couple beers to get me past this.

The stupidest part of all is that I should've seen this coming. Two years in a row, some rabbit scaled the two foot chicken wire surrounding my raised beds and built a nest under my chives. The first year the dogs got them. The next year, the babies got big enough to hop around, and I "airlifted" them to my front yard.

Is this karma? Was I a rabbit-killing dog in a former life?