Jealous Tattletale

Yup, this is me and my giant rabbit on our porch in Panama

Sometime after settling into our life in Panama, I got an albino rabbit that I named Snowflake. He was a very large, white rabbit with red eyes. Because houses in Panama have walled in yards, we let Snowflake explore and wander during the day, and then would put him in his coop at night.

As Snowflake got more comfortable exploring our yard, he also got more comfortable coming up on our porch, where our parrot Squirt’s cage was. He also discovered a love for the delectable plants mom kept on the porch. Whenever we noticed that Snowflake was munching on mom’s potted plants, one of us would holler, “STOP IT, SNOWFLAKE!” The rabbit would scurry off the porch and back into the yard, where he was free to munch on whatever he wanted.

It wasn’t long before Squirt figured out the connection, and boy, did he have fun tattletaling on the guilty rabbit. The instant the rabbit would get a whisker too close to the porch, Squirt would yell as loud as he could with mom’s voice, “STOP IT, SNOWFLAKE!” One of us would run over from wherever we were and shoo the rabbit away before he could eat mom’s plants. Didn’t take long for Snowflake to just bolt away after being yelled at, and Squirt would audibly belly laugh.

Watch out for the tattletale!

I am almost positive that Squirt was jealous of Snowflake’s freedom to wander wherever he wanted, and because of that he took extra delight in making sure that everyone in a ten mile radius knew if Snowflake was misbehaving. The poor rabbit had to deal with the jealous bird bossing him around his whole life.

A few years after Snowflake died, I got a little white dog that I named Fluffy. By this time we lived in a different house, and Squirt lived inside our house instead of on the porch. He loved being part of our family activities, but he didn’t love Fluffy joining the family. Fluffy stole our attention, barked a lot, and added a whole new level of chaos to our house.

When Fluffy first entered the scene, Squirt would holler, “STOP IT, SNOWFLAKE!” all the time. I guess since both Snowflake and Fluffy were white, Squirt thought they were the same. However, it didn’t take him long to make the connection that the new creature was not Snowflake but Fluffy.

Fluffy had an affinity for scaring our upstairs neighbor. When the neighbor would open his door to take the trash out, Fluffy would come over to our glass door, wait until the neighbor’s foot got to the stair right in front of our door, and then jump on the window and bark hysterically. The neighbor would yelp, shriek, throw the trash, and jump ten feet in the air.

We would try to stifle our laughter and yell at Fluffy to stop it.

Squirt figured out the connection between the sound of the neighbor’s door opening with the chaos that came next, and very quickly took it upon himself to yell at Fluffy the instant he heard the door open. From his perch in the cage, Squirt would chase Fluffy away with an outrageous, “STOP IT, FLUFFY!” And of course, he’d finish with a victorious laugh.

We had a parrot who was very much jealous of other pets and took great delight in letting us know when they were doing something wrong. We had no idea that we were teaching Squirt to do this, but then again…we had no idea we were teaching Squirt to do anything. He was way too smart for our own good.