Puppy Vs. Bunny

The backyard bunnies added a sense of pastoral tranquility during the early days of Pinewood living about two years ago.
They'd come out along the back fence, wriggling their noses, cautiously moving about and keeping alert for threats from above.
Their appearance generated excitement in the household. The kids jumped up and down, and the wife stared at them with a faraway look in her eyes, finding some sense of peace in their presence.
Around fall 2006, just months after we moved in, the bunnies disappeared. We figured it was a seasonal thing, or perhaps an owl thing, but they never returned. We haven't seen them for about 18 months.
Yesterday, the wife called with the news 0f tragedy in the forest. Yes, a bunny had appeared, but our puppy, which we think is some kind of runt Rhodesian ridgeback, about the size of a small beagle, made quick work of it.
The dog, whom we named Jill after we acquired her a few months after our other puppy, Jack, escaped the back yard and got pancaked on State Highway 105, has been terrorizing and narrowly missing squirrels for the past few months.
It was only a matter of time before she made her first kill.
She made quick and painless work of the bunny, snapping its neck with an instinctive move. My wife saw her parading around the yard with the bunny and gnawing on its little bunny leg.
Considering my wife's love of the long-lost bunnies, I can't imagine how she felt seeing one of them go down in such a violent way, after all this hope that the critters would return.
Nevertheless, she knew what she had to do: dispose of the bunny body.
My advice to her was to take a shovel and just toss it over the back fence, where it would fall into the natural food chain.
The lifeless bunny and its lolling head proved to be a challenge, though, and the wife barely managed to get it over the fence. It lay just out of reach of a puppy that badly wanted her bunny back.
Jill, a supersmart dog with the sense of hearing and smell of a cinder block, went straight to the back fence this morning to see if the carcass remained.
I followed her out, and there was no trace of the bunny, not even a tooth, hair or eyeball. Something in the night had dragged it away.
I feel a sense of sadness that as long as we have a dog, those early, halcyon days of bunnydom will never return.
However, there is comfort in knowing that if something more sinister appears in the back yard, such as a venomous snake, that Jill will be on it like bunnies on lettuce.