"Some are born great and some have greatness thrust upon them," according to William Shakespeare. Profound, and you'd be hard pushed to find anyone who disagreed.

However, a more difficult task would be finding someone who disagreed with the same statement only with the word "greatness" replaced with "pets".

I, sadly, fall into the second category. I have had a pet thrust upon me and have little choice but to accept my fate and wear my crown as food-giver to a furry nation of one.

As pets go, he's not a bad little fellow: A cute, white rabbit with the face of an angel and the appetite of a bulldog. But that's not my gripe. My problem is I have no idea how to look after him (I presume he's a he!).

The story of how this little fellow has come to set up home on my balcony is a disturbing and, I fear, not a unique one in this or any other country. An unwanted birthday gift, he was about to be released back into the wild of downtown Beijing to fend for himself and be one with nature when my girlfriend intervened.

Having a head as soft as my girlfriend's heart, I agreed to take him in, on condition she agreed to follow him around my flat at all times with a dustpan and brush.

What has been scary is how we have cooed over this animal endlessly for the last several weeks like he was a newborn child.

What has been REALLY scary is some of the posts on Chinese online forums we have endeavored to visit to make sure everything he does is "normal" (well, he is only two months old, we want to know he's developing right).

One guy on the "ask Baidu" pages asked: "My rabbit gets too hot in the summer. What can I do?" The reply, which most of you will probably guess, went something like "try using less chili in the hotpot".

Another concerned pet lover mused: "My rabbit has very warm ears, should I put him in the refrigerator for a while?"

"Can rabbits eat snacks?" asked another netizen. "My classmate's rabbit eats everything, someone fed it candy and chips and now its fur keeps dropping off. My classmate even kissed it. Does it have a disease?"

As though that did not make me shudder enough, that last post sparked the reply: "My rabbit eats porridge and buns with me every morning. He seems to be okay, except for the odd bout of hiccups?"

One desperate schoolboy begged: "How can I get rid of my rabbit's smell? My mother threatened to throw it out of my window. We live on the sixth floor."

Another pondered: "My friend took his rabbit into the shower with him and it died. I got mine wet by accident one time but he didn't die. Who can tell me, do rabbits need a shower? And if so, how do you stop them from dying during?"

And I could not help feeling for the chap who wrote: "My rabbit died, what can I do?" I felt sympathy for his loss and also for the fact that, of the answers he received, more than 50 percent suggested "knocking up a hotpot", shortly followed by "bury it" and "take a specimen of DNA in case you can clone him in the future".

The respondents who wrote "burn it, put the ashes in a bag and hang it around your neck to ward off evil spirits", however, should probably be given a wide berth if you should ever meet them in the street.

Needless to say, my girlfriend and I have decided to rely on our own counsel when it comes to feeding him, and we've already exploited my favorite website Taobao.com for a water bottle and a block of unidentifiable hard stuff for him to keep his teeth short.

I'm hoping the latter arrives before he's gone through all my slippers and telephone wires.

(China Daily July 1, 2009)