Last summer, while jogging the trail around an urban lake near my home, I found a bunny, obviously someone's pet that had gotten loose: white, fuzzy, with spots. It looked naive and hungry, gnawing ditch weeds while fully exposed to whatever carnivore might pass by. And so I caught the rabbit, which took little in the way of effort since it was quite friendly. For the next two months, I tried in vain to find its owner. Apparently, whoever lost it didn't want it back.

Next, I looked to the local humane society to take the thing. No dice there -- they were flooded with bunnies. Bunnies both found and relinquished. In the end, it boiled down to two choices: Take it back to the lake, or keep it. I chose the latter.

And why not? The rabbit was a quiet little guy who lived on salad, used a litter box, and slept under the bed. The bunny's room and board was covered from the proceeds of a magazine article I published about just exactly how hard it is to get rid of a rabbit, the third most populous animal at the nation's shelters. An alt-weekly put me and the rabbit on their cover, and they posted an interview with me and the bunny on YouTube (645 views to date). Women across the country commented. It turned them on, they wrote, to see a (single)...