Bunny Roadkill at Loyola

So there I was on my bike, zipping along on my commute, rediscovering old favorites on my ipod.  And then I had to swerve to miss running over a dead bunny rabbit on St. Charles in front of Loyola U.  Now, this is a city.  What the heck is a bunny doing trying to cross the street here?  He must have lived in Audubon Park with the geese and alligators.  But what made him make a run for it?  On my way to work it seemed he’d been very recently hit.  He looked like he could have been asleep, except for the bloody neck.  But by the time I was headed home, his body was definitely the worse for wear, with his legs bent back and run over and his eyes pecked out by some hungry bird.  He kind of looked deflated.  It wasn’t pretty.  It made me feel really, really sad.  I was thinking, though, how often I pass squirrels dead on the street and don’t really give it a second thought.  I mean, squirrels are just bushy-tailed rats, right?  Bunnies are cute as all get out, what with their floppity ears and soft fur and chompity-chomp teeth.  But mostly what it is, I think, is that we become accustomed to certain kinds of death–squirrels are the least of it–while other deaths always strike us as just a little more tragic.  It’s just a matter of what we’re used to seeing, what becomes normal.  But this dead bunny became normal pretty quickly, as cars just ran right over him.  Sometimes the speed with which we as a culture learn to accept certain kinds of violence freaks me out.  But then I just get back on my bike and let it fade into the background, like most of us.

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