Great Leaping Lapins!

As though she hasn't enough work to do. She's the mother of a little girl, has a full-time job, a house to tend to, and seven dogs of her own, along with one she is fostering, and a cat as well. She's a lover of animals, feels they deserve her love and respect and care. So she also has rabbits, six, or is it seven - maybe eight?

• all beloved, all nurtured
• all laboriously, patiently, paired
• all carefully, daily tended
• all nutritiously fed
• all veterinarianed when required
• all housed, in pairs, in their own brightly playful condominiums

There are most certainly enough of these little creatures and they represent a variety of types, personalities and characters. Some have floppy ears, others upstanding. Some are spotted, others not. Some have ruffled collars, some require that their mottled fur be brushed frequently, others need their fur to be carefully cut around the stomach, paws. Some are playful, others not so much.

Some of these pairs are careful to leave their droppings where they belong; others subscribe to a more hygiene-careless code and leave those little balls of excrement everywhere; food areas not excluded. Some of these little beasts enjoy interaction with their care-giver; others are more inclined to stand-offishness. They are all accustomed to the presence of the dogs, tiny, small, medium and large. And the cat who evinces no interest in them whatever.

Their enclosures are sufficiently large to guarantee them space to move about happily, and they are further challenged by three stages of vertical floors each of which they access handily through their built-in escalator-propensity to hop. So, why, given all of this, does one ungracious little mophead decide to leap the perimeter of his enclosure to access his neighbour's and engage in a territorial dispute?

Which leads to the obvious: war, aggression, is a byproduct of the male species' territorial imperative - whether there is a legitimate reason of circumstance or not.