Hi - it’s a complex one so I’ll try to keep it brief. We had a small family holiday - long weekend away an hour or so away. No extended family available but we rarely go away so bit the bullet and booked a petsitting couple through an agency at humongous expense for the few days as we have a couple of cats, dogs and three (now two) rabbits.
Now the couple were lovely, and I should say I don’t think they caused the death in any way. I am aware that rabbits can go downhill quickly and luckily we have a blink cam in the front garden so could review the footage, but I didn’t do this on the three days we were away as we were getting regular ‘all’s ok’ updates from the sitters and we had explicitly asked to be informed if there were any problems.
On the Saturday he (the rabbit, not the sitter!) looked a bit quieter than usual in the footage that we watched back later, and the sitters did keep them all fed, also replenishing the water (one bottle on the wire run, one inside their hutch that they can go into freely all the time). On Sunday morning rabbit goes inside and doesn’t come back out, at all. Sitter makes a brief check later opening the door and after that visit there is no more water etc put inside, only outside in the outside water bottle where the other rabbit is hopping about. After that only the outside bottle is changed and the inside appears to have been left well alone, like they know what has happened and are leaving the dead rabbit well alone. I should say I said and wrote several times to let me know if anything at all was wrong.
We came back yesterday (Monday) morning to happy dogs and cats, and the sittters appeared to have looked after everything well. But later in the morning when I went to check the rabbits I found him dead and without going into too much detail re: rigor, flies etc it was obvious he had been dead for some time.
I feel from the footage I’ve looked at and the state he was in it is obvious that the sitter/s know but just didn’t want to tell us. I can understand that rabbits can go downhill quickly and that on Sunday a vet may not have been an option, especially as he was probably dead already, and I’m really trying to be reasonable but I really hated finding him like that - and the thought that they knew I would have wanted to be informed, but chose not to. I’m just glad neither of the kids made the discovery first.
I am thinking of letting the company know but I don’t want to be unreasonable and am not sure of my rights in this either. As I say, I’m sure they didn’t cause the death itself, it’s more about being informed and respecting my wishes in that, it really was a horrible shock…
Yabu - they did their best and clearly just wanted to avoid awkwardness, it is best left alone
Yanbu - at the least the company needs to be informed about this.