Geek pets
Chickens make good geek pets. They don't need their owners to play with them, they don't mess up the house, they put themselves to bed at night and wake themselves up in the morning. They're cheap to feed, and will happily eat two-week old pizza and turn it into eggs. Eggs are great. You can put one into boiling water and when you remember that it exists it's probably done. Chickens are good.

House rabbits make bad geek pets. Rabbits like to chew things, especially long thin things like grass, twigs, branches, network cabling and power adaptors. Currently, our awfully cute rabbit has chewed through the following since he first arrived:

• 3-4 x phone cords
• 3-4 x mobile phone chargers (repairable)
• Endless meters of UTP cabling
• Numerous vegetables and small trees (including half a sapling orange tree)
• Speaker cord (into multiple small pieces).
• Power cord
• Ariel cables

Rabbits get on surprisingly poorly with modern electronic equipment. While our bunny has suffered no ill effects from his adventures, there's only so many times you want to shorten your patch-leads or re-solder your mobile phone charger.

On the up-side, rabbits are very friendly and quiet pets. They toilet train nicely, and once you get a grasp of rabbit body-language they're a pleasure to deal with.