I (24F) have two roommates. Ella (28F) and John (23F), they are dating - fake names. Extra context: I work in vet med, I’m the go to person for animal related stuff in our house
We have been renting this house for a little more than 6 months but never had a working lawn mower, needless to say the grass had gotten pretty tall.
About two weeks ago, they got a new lawn mower. Leading up to this and after, I kept telling them before we mow we need to check the yard for a bunny nest. Our neighborhood has a lot of wild bunnies! I had to have told them we need to do this AT LEAST 20 times.
Last weekend, I was out of town for an appointment. On Sunday, I was driving home around 6pm when Ella texts me that there’s a mole hill in the yard and John had hit it with the lawn mower. I question it a bit, especially since they only say there is just one mole hill, usually there would be more. Ella and John then poured rancid chocolate milk down the “mole hole”, this caused the “moles” to surface for air. Except they weren’t moles, they were baby bunnies, 5 less than a week old. And they had almost drowned them in chocolate milk.
Luckily, after this happened, mom bunny still came back. She recovered the nest with fur, but there was only about a foot of tall grass left in front of it. Mom would hang around almost all day, probably stressed by her nest having been destroyed, but other than that all was going well!
Tonight, I went out for drinks with friends. I was about 30 minutes from home. Ella texts me that the baby bunnies are screaming and she sees something in the yard, a raccoon. She yells at it through the window and it runs off for a moment before it comes back. The babies are screaming again and Ella tells me she hears “crunching” and sends me a video of them screaming. Mind you, I am still 30 minutes away, even if I had left immediately I would not have been there soon enough to chase off the raccoon. Ella ends up just saying she’s going back to bed, rather than turning on a light or trying to scare it off like I mentioned.
By the time I got home and went to check the yard, mom bunny was gone and the nest was destroyed and empty. I could not find any sign of the babies anywhere. I can’t help but feeling mad that my roommates didn’t listen to me, they never do. They didn’t listen to me about checking for a nest before mowing, therefore exposing it to predators. And they didn’t try to scare off the raccoon and cover the nest, they just let it kill off the babies.
Am I wrong to feel that it is their fault the baby bunnies were killed? I know this is the circle of life and this stuff happens in the wild, but I feel the bunnies would have lived if they nest hadn’t been uncovered by the mower