When I was little, like three years old, we had bunnies and a dog. The bunnies lived in a little hutch under our back porch and the male bunny we got turned out to be a pregnant female - so we had Barbara Bunny and her babies. I don't remember much about them but I CLEARLY remember one of my babysitters handling them and getting bitten - I was very pleased I didn't like him much. We also had a little mutt dog that we had found as a stray wandering around our isolated northern highways - he had an underbite, wiry patchy hair, he was skinny and shakey and the ugliest dog in town. His name was Peanut because he looked like one when he lay down.

When my brother was 2 he contracted encephalitis and had to be med-evacced from our mining town in Northern Canada to a hospital first in BC then in Ontario. He was in a coma for several weeks, and he incurred irreperable brain damage and at the time no one expected him to survive. My father is... not all there. This broke him but he couldn't understand what was really happening and when he heard that my brother had a VIRUS he thought it was a BUG and figured it must have come from the animals.

So he killed them all.

I found out when I was in my early 20s when my mum told me. I was shocked. They'd always told me that Peanut ran off because he got married. I don't remember worrying about the bunnies. But yeah. Santa didn't come as a fucking shock, but that did. Years later when we were travelling cross canada and basically homeless for three months my family had a cat that got lost in Portage la Prairie, Manitoba. They've denied it ever since but I will never know if he really did get off his leash at our campsite that night or if they dumped him - they did that to several other cats over the years.