Not about dogs, but….
Most people think I’m totally making $*&! up when I tell them this. When I had my first rabbit, I ended up with a single rat as well as the rabbit. Long story how the rat came to live with us, but rats don’t really do very well on their own unless you can give them oodles of attention. As I was getting quite busy in high school I didn’t have as much time to play with the rat, and to supervise the rabbit’s out time. I ended up letting them have their free time in my room together.
Bun was not terribly interested in the rat at first. He would kind of sit still and watch her. She, on the other hand, was afraid of nothing in the world and sweet as can be. She would run over to him, sniff him, say hello, and he would go along with this until she would try to climb his face and climb all over him. He was like, yeah, not having that, and would wander off to his own corner. As he expressed no agression and simply hopped off, and she spent most of her free time climbing on me and playing chase with me and didn’t pester him much, I didn’t try to separate them and just kept an eye out (always had to anyways since he was a destroyer of furniture bottoms). She continued to make passes at him here and there, and within a week he came around. I have no idea what changed, but he one day decided to let her crawl on him when she came to say hi, then they began to play follow the leader around a bit, and then there was laying next to one another, and then mutual grooming. I was completely baffled by the connection, but thought, okay, the rabbit never liked me, and the rat is lonely…. so….. after a bit I ended up caging them together and what resulted can’t be called anything but a bond.
Why do I say that? Here is the really weird part. Pippin (rat) developed a mammory tumor. She lived with it for a while, as the vet advised us at her age the surgery would be too stressful and would only prolong her life a few months maybe, so not worth it. She said the tumor did not hurt her, but once it got large enough that she couldn’t get around or was not able to keep weight on, we would have to put her down. It took probably the better part of a year for it to get to there, but finally we did have to get her euthanised. Bun immediately quit eating and drinking. We of course took him to the vet, who advised us to use those needle free syringes to force feed him liquid food and water. Try as we might, he wouldn’t even take that most of the time and we just couldn’t get much of anything into him. The vet said to keep trying, and he would hopefully come round. Well, sadly, he didn’t, and the inevitably he couldn’t keep going like that and passed on 4 days after we put her down (really really really crappy week). In hindsight, I wish the vet would have told me how quickly they go downhill so we could have left him in emergency care – he seemed to be hanging on but very suddenly looked poor and within 20 minutes (before we could get to the vet obviously) that was that. Well, anyhow, I don’t know how to interpret the whole thing but that the rabbit chose not to live. And I don’t know how anyone can say rabbit/other bond doesn’t really exist – at least, I think I have proof to the contrary.
I guess it’s like the person on BB forums who has ended up with a surprise-quartet (I’ve been lurking). You just never know. Obviously not a predator/prey situation, and all advise to take care is prudent. But, life does amaze you, is the point I’m trying to make.