Sadie is my bluetick coonhound. I love Sadie. She’s an awesome dog. But she is also a murderer; A coldblooded bunny killer.

I knew that cats brought mice home to their owners as gifts. But I had no idea dogs did the same. One spring day, Sadie brought her pack leaders (us) a gift. Hubby and I spotted Sadie overjoyed and waggy tailed doing circles around her bed.  When we went to scope out what she was so proud of, we saw it. At first, we thought it was a dead mouse in her bed. But upon closer inspection, to our horror, we realized it was a little baby bunny.

“Babe, what the hell is that in Sadie’s bed?” I asked the rhetorical question, holding his arm for support. We both knew what Sadie had done. It was clear by the animal’s big floppy ears, large hoppy feet with fat bitty toes that Thumper was right there in front of us, laying dead in our dog’s bed.

“Murderer!” I screamed with tears in my eyes at Sadie who immediately put her tail between her legs and flattened her ears, avoiding my glare realizing she might be in trouble. But my voice seemed to awaken the dead bunny. It began to twitch.

“Oh my god! It’s not dead!” I yelled the obvious. There it was, suffering in Sadie’s bed, writhing in pain, eyelids half closed and trembling as it slowly lost its will to live.

“Do something!” I looked at my hubby, but he was just as freaked out as I was.

“Do WHAT?” he yelled back distraught, running his hands over his head.

“I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know!” My voice cracked, a lump forming in my throat. I didn’t want to say the unthinkable. We both knew full well what had to be done: a mercy killing.

“Sadie’s a murderer!” I screamed at my dog, stalling.

“It’s not her fault!” Hubby defended her. “She’s a hound dog. It’s her job to hunt rabbits!” Hubby was pacing around, agony all over his face at the thought of having to do his manly duty for me, his damsel in distress, and take the bunny’s life.

“Dear god! The poor bunny! What are we gonna doooo?” I cry-screamed.

“Are you sure it’s not already dead?” he asked, his hands balled into anxious fists. We both approached Sadie’s bed hesitantly. The bunny twitched.

“Shit!” one of us said.

And then, out of nowhere, the answer to our problem appeared in the form of a seventy-something, five foot nothing, farm-raised woman. My mother.

She bravely came downstairs hearing all the commotion. Hubby left the room frantic as I pointed wordlessly to Sadie’s bed, showing my mommy the cause of my grief. She rolled up her sleeves and went to the bunny, cradled it in her apron and swiftly took it outside. I couldn’t bear to look and turned away, shielding my eyes and plugging my ears from whatever my old-school Brazilian mother was going to do.

She returned moments later, bunnyless. “Mae (mom), what’d you do?” I asked. I didn’t want to hear the answer, but I had to know the bunny was no longer suffering. “Did you kill it?” I asked petrified, on the verge of a complete meltdown.

My mother, seeing the stress on my face answered “No, filha (daughter), of course not. I just blew on it like this…” She gave two quick blows in her hands to demonstrate, “and the bunny was okay and just hopped away into the bushes.”

“Really?” I asked and went outside naively expecting to see Thumper’s cottontail disappearing happily into the wild.

“Yes! He’s gone. He left to find his family,” she said all nonchalant, wiping her hands on her apron before removing it to hide any evidence of the bunny slaughter.

We all know she ‘took care of business’ by snapping the bunny’s neck. Thankfully, she had the good sense to lie to us about it.

RIP Thumper.