"What about down near the fence?" she yells.

"No, I want to put some mulberries there," I bark a little too tersely into a bed of tilled topsoil up near the house.

Suffering the antithetical anxiety of gardening, I'm in no mood for high-stakes decision-making because I'm a fortnight late transplanting this year's sunflowers and dealing with a crop of droopy drama queens protesting against their new digs under a perfectly benign sun.

"Near the nasturtiums?" she yells again.

"No, I mow there."

"Where then?"

"Dunno."

Our Saturday morning version of that ode to passive-aggressive domesticity, There's a Hole in My Bucket, goes on for a couple of more ridiculous verses until my own dear Liza (or is she dear Henry in this is case?) gives up and buries the rabbit at a unilaterally declared location.

It's a good choice, in the yielding dirt of a pre-dug hole marking one of my many arboreal failures and camouflaged by an old mesh fence being annexed by privet and honeysuckle, two ambitious weeds on a fascist health kick.

As we've learned, finding an appropriate final resting place for a pet isn't easy.

The grave needs to be out of the way, a shady nook to be stumbled upon organically, rather than a monumental mourning site, which not only suggests a certain red-flag devotion to the deceased but a sadomasochistic fetish for edge-trimming.

I also want it out of sight and out of mind for the benefit of the rabbit's owner.

Our new teenager has had a tough time of it lately and the animal's surprise demise adds to the many stresses of a young life blossoming amid an already challenging year (bushfires, pandemic, new high school, pre-dawn rises, long bus rides, a best friend moving interstate, puberty, braces ...).

Her beloved dwarf lop had a touch of mongrel in her, which made her the smarter and wilier of the pair allegedly "shared" among the three kids. The pure-breed (and mercifully desexed) male is a far more handsome creature but as thick as two short planks and since his companion died, just sits in his enclosure and stares blankly into the middle distance (precisely what he did when she was alive).

The rabbits' capacious home is actually a tennis court-sized pen I built for our English pointers, two sisters from a litter of nine (yes, the pointer sisters).

The fact we have rabbits and no longer dogs speaks to the trauma experienced as each of our "girls" died. They were with us before children and both, to our great shame, only made it to about 10 years old.

The first was run over by a ute out the front of the house and then, for good measure, by the vehicle's trailer. She presented at the screen door producing a plaintive whimper I've never heard before or since, a hind leg swinging in the breeze and a deep, mortal gouge splitting her torso.

Having never spent a pre- or post-partum slumber apart, her bereft sister cried herself to sleep for weeks until she developed cancer and died an accelerated, grief-stricken death barely a year later.

We buried them in the yard, too, their chalky bones now mingling with the many skeletons of canines we assume never enjoyed the same life of luxury as our doted-upon adoptees, an assumption bolstered by probative chunks of iron hammered like Excalibur into the ground across various points of the property, vestigial links of rusty chain still attached, vague hints of something akin to slavery.

Our home was once a much harsher place for animals, and people.

Upon returning from school to learn she was no longer the mother of a fur baby, our daughter keened just as that suddenly sisterless pointer sister had done.

It's the sound I made when my own childhood dog died, accompanied by that specific sadness only animals seem capable of stirring, often for the first time when we were ambushed by the dark side of Disney.

But Bambi was never in it for me.

The first tears I cried for bestial tragedy came while watching Ring of Bright Water, the 1969 film based on Gavin Maxwell's book about raising otters in coastal Scotland.

By today's standards, Maxwell - a man who was literally cursed - would fail dismally as a naturalist (he'd be up on kidnap, biosecurity and neglect charges just to begin with) but his writing so lovingly reminds us why it's the humble, little critters which can sometimes capture our hearts even more wholly than all those limelight-hogging hogs and dogs and cats and horses and elephants.

I sit in a pitch-pine-panelled kitchen-living room, with an otter asleep on its back among the cushions on the sofa, forepaws in the air, and with the expression of tightly shut concentration that very small babies wear in sleep.

Being lucky enough to live in the bush, a mammalian wonderland, it's not often I feel we're missing out in the fauna department but ever since Ring of Bright Water, I've had an otter-sized hole in my nature-loving life, filled only sporadically by visits to inevitably depressing, albeit well-intentioned, zoos.

Rather unfairly, Australia is sans-otter but we make up for this bureaucratic oversight of Gondwanaland proportions by having the next best things: water-rats and platypus.

These days, the cane toad-killing water-rat goes by its Indigenous moniker "rakali", an attempt to reverse negative perceptions about its overall, well, ratness, and also after we were subjected to that Sydney Harbour cop show for about four years longer than necessary.

Of course, our famous oviparous duck-billed, beaver-tailed national treasure doesn't need a reputation rehab like the rakali, because it's globally adored, which is why it's so astonishing (yet, sadly, unsurprising) to learn wildlife groups are calling for the species to be listed as threatened because it has reportedly lost a fifth of its habitat in the past 30 years (and given the collective noun for platypus, such statistics really do suggest we're headed up a certain creek without a "paddle").

Fatigue is such a corrosive modern-day affliction. Fatigue makes it quicker and easier to buy a 13-year-old another dim rabbit (a scourge on our landscape) rather than use those same dollars to ensure her own kids will one day be walking past a river and witness astute platypus and dignified rakali patrolling their protected waters with all the sleek charm of Aussie otters.

Or is it?