RIGA, Latvia (AFP) — Latvia's "First Rabbit" has died after less than a year of having free rein in the official home of the country's president, Valdis Zatlers, the Baltic News Service (BNS) reported Thursday.
Zatlers told BNS that the rabbit, called Lisis, had apparently had trouble coming to terms with moving to the presidential home, despite being allowed to roam freely instead of being kept in a hutch.
Zatlers, a 52-year-old doctor, was plucked from the relative obscurity of heading Riga's State Traumatology and Orthopedics Hospital to take on the largely figurehead role of president last July.
He had previously said that the animal, bought by his teenage son, felt like a real family member.
Latvia's president has two official residences: Riga Castle in the capital, and a seaside home in the Baltic resort town of Jurmala.
The demise of Lisis does not leave the president without a pet, however.
At Christmas, the Zatlers family adopted a stray, sick kitten and have reportedly nursed the animal back to robust health.
For Lisis, the move to the presidential home represented a step up for the five-year-old animal, who had previously lived in the family's apartment in the centre of Riga.
The rabbit had already been through a human-imposed shake-up before: the Zatlers family originally thought he was a female and called him Mona Lisa, before discovering their mistake and renaming him.
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