Bunny

[guppiecat]

Where’s my cow?

Is that my cow?

It goes, “Mootz!”

It is a bunny!

That’s not my cow!

Originally posted at stories.starmind.org.

Comments

[carbonel]

"Mootz"?

[guppiecat]

Yep, "mootz"

[guppiecat]

More seriously ... when my mom was 5, she got in trouble at school. They were going around the class asking what noises different animals made. So kids were going "meow" and "woof" and such as one does in kindergarten. My mom got a bunny so she said "mootz".

In English, bunnies don't make noise (or, more precisely, there is no word assigned to the noise they do make). However, that's not true in Czech, which was her dad's first language. So she was taught "mootz" along with "meow", "woof", "gobble", "neigh", etc.

She answered what she thought was the right answer, but the teacher thought she was sassing her, so she got in trouble ... and it was apparently traumatic enough that everyone in the family (and apparently *only* everyone in the family) knows the "mootz" story.

[carbonel]

It seems rather unfair of the teacher to assign an animal that doesn't have a canonical noise. I wonder what she expected your mother to say.

I've heard angora rabbits making a soft cooing/purring sort of noise when people were spinning directly off the fur; apparently they were enjoying the process.