Obit for a rabbit

Our family rabbit, Peppy, died this morning. He was 9 years old.
Those of you who met Peppy, or rather saw him running around our house, know he wasn't your average caged bunny. My cousin Nikki took charge of him after a friend found him in the woods. A baby smaller than the size of your palm, he'd been sprayed by a skunk and wasn't allowed back into his mother's burrow. Knowing my mom and dad were suckers for animals (we already had a dog, two guinea pigs, a parakeet and numerous fish) Nikki dropped by with the helpless bunny, and after a little bit of pleading from my brother and I, he was ours. We fed him with an eyedropper for weeks and kept him in an empty fish aquarium with a heat lamp. Later, we litter-trained him and let him have free reign of the house. I'll admit there were times I wasn't so found of Peppy, mostly in his early years when he chewed on everything and randomly peed on people and things to mark his territory. This included me and my clothes, in particular a pair of white pants I had to wear to band performances during the summer. That pair always held Peppy's yellow spotting no matter how hard my mom and I tried to scrub the stain out. We put up baby gates at the entrances of our bedrooms to limit destruction and threw out our living room couch after he chewed the bottom to pieces. But through it all, we really did love our unique pet.
Part of my mom's daily routine was giving Peppy a morning carrot and many other snacks throughout the day. All it took was a call of his name and a pat on the floor to make him come running to you for a quick rub of his ears and back. We laughed at how he cleaned himself like a cat and basked in the sun on the kitchen rug. He got along with other animals, including our lab Goldie, the dogs down the street and even our cousin's cat. And most recently, he started his retirement down south, moving to Florida with my mom in November.
He leaves reminders of his life around our Michigan house: a remote control with half the buttons chopped off, tattered edges of photo books on a shelf close to the floor and if you look hard enough behind the furniture or in the corners of the rooms, a couple pieces of woodchips displaced from his cage. He was the last one left from our once-flourishing family zoo and he'll be missed.