Goodbye to baby Bramble

I’ve been meaning to update about out sweet little guy Bramble for some time now. He has done us so proud over the last two years. Having been the poorliest of all his siblings, there were times when we thought he wouldn’t make it to adulthood, never mind old age. It has been a wonderful, but scary, journey looking after our wheezy little rat. But our Bramble was a fighter and he went on to outlive all of his siblings and matured into a beautiful, slightly cranky old age boy until he passed away peacefully.

Treat time

Bramble had been on his own since his adopted brother Chestnut had passed away, and I’m pleased to say he had coped very well with this adjustment. Bramble has always been a bit of a cuddly rat and he loved nothing more than being curled up at the bottom of a pile of sleeping rats. But Bramble being a little fighter made the adjustment. Derek and I tried spent as much time with Bramble as we could, though as an old boy he liked to sleep a lot. He did still appreciate his meal times though, and made sure he was awake everyday to help us finish our dinners.

Cuddly Bramble

To keep Bramble safe, we had changed his cage to what we call our ‘rattie retirement cage’, which is a lower height rabbit cage. Bramble was getting quite wobbly and we could see that even though he wanted to get up to his ‘high up beds’ he was having difficulty. Moving him to a retirement cage meant he could keep his favourite beds and tunnels, but they could be placed at a lower height. Bramble was very happy with the change, and obviously found it much easier to climb up to his favourite bed.

Recently though we had started to see a decrease in Bramble’s appetite, so we introduced baby food into his diet. At first Bramble couldn’t resist, but even his interest in baby food started to tail off.

We are going to miss our little Bramble so much, he was such a naughty little character always finding mischief to get into and harassing his brothers in that cute baby of the family way :-). Though it hard to say goodbye, we are grateful for our time with Bramble, having been prepared to loose him a young age everyday day we had with him feels like a true gift. Even on his last day with us Bramble did us proud eating several teaspoons of baby food, and then wanting to be with us, so that both Derek and I were with him when he died peacefully in my hands last night.