After Roman’s Sunday tantrum, where he ate part of a carpet and caused no end of trouble; Claire and I thought that he would be better behaved yesterday – especially as we would both be spending the day downstairs and keeping him company.

How wrong we were…

Roman had probably been in his run for less than an hour, when, upon entering the front room, we saw to our horror that he had started a repeat of his bad behaviour from the weekend – destroying and consuming carpet!

He naturally received a stern telling off, which seemed to curb his craziness. The little shit ended up sulking and grooming himself – disproving the theory that you can’t polish a turd.

Roman has never behaved in this manner before. While he can be grumpy from time to time, the last couple of days he has been borderline psychotic!

I now have a theory to explain all of this…

As a treat, Roman is given dried mango twice a day. He goes absolutely crazy for the stuff. The bunny has a good appetite at the best of times, but will devour this tropical treat faster than any fresh vegetable, nugget or other dried fruit.

Mango is considerably sweeter than any other morsel he may be given. I remember an occasion when Roman was allowed to run around our front room, shortly after I had eaten a doughnut.

Bits of sugar from my Krispy Kreme (only the best for us) had fallen onto the Leeds United rug beneath my feet. Normally this would be cleaned up, but for whatever reason – probably Roman demanding he be let out – this time it didn’t happen.

When Romy hopped over to see his human daddy, he seemed very excited. He had clearly discovered the remains of my doughnut, and was licking it all up, before we could stop him.

It was clear that our rabbit had a sweet tooth. It’s not as odd as it may sound. Many years ago, I had a bunny named Sparky (after the dog on South Park*), who ate chocolate cake. She only tried cake once, and the bit she did eat, she had stolen from me.

* South Park fans with a good memory will recall that Sparky was Stan’s gay dog. Sparky the rabbit was a birthday present for me. My mum promises that the pet shop told her that she was buying a male rabbit. I therefore thought it was amusingly ironic how my other pet rabbit, Snowy – also a boy – kept trying to mount Sparky, whenever they came into contact. A couple of months later, I found out why, when I discovered a pile of baby bunnies.

I hope you enjoyed that sub-story. Two blog posts for the price of one and all that. Now back to the madness of King Roman…

The fact that Roman was eagerly lapping up each and every grain of doughnut sugar told me that he had taste for sweet things.

This sweet tooth of his, would also explain how he would go wild for dried mango. It even suggested to me why he had been acting insane the last two days.

Sugar is addictive. If you were to eat a sweet treat at the same time every day, your body would feel physically and mentally unwell, should you ever stop consuming it.

A day or two before Roman’s first outburst, we had stopped feeding him mango treats. This wasn’t a punishment. The dried mango we had for him looked poor quality, and we didn’t want to make him ill.

My theory is that this lack of mango and the associated sugar, was responsible for all the recent trouble.

Claire and I have already decided, that if mango has such a bad effect on our rabbit, he won’t be getting any again… ever. This may sound harsh, but we wouldn’t be responsible bunny parents, if we fed him something which could impact negatively on his health.

We also both love him very much – despite calling him a “little shit” on my blog – and would like him to live a long, healthy life.

He will simply have to go cold turkey, until his body has recovered from the sugar. It’ll be hard on our boy – I should know, as I have experience of drug withdrawal… I’ve seen it on Trainspotting.

Sorry, Rome. At least you’ve still got your dried carrot – until we discover you’ve developed night vision.