There's a house in our neighborhood that has about 1,209,406 tulips. It's quite lovely, but I wonder how they solved the problem of blossom-munching rabbits. The answer can only be bribery, coyote urine, or snipers.

Our tulips were duly decapitated by this year's batch of bunnies, and my wife was peeved.

"Did you apply sufficient coyote urine?" I said. To be fair, that's a good response to everything these days.

You'd be surprised how it can turn things to your advantage. Boss says your work on the Johnson contract was substandard and they lost the client, you can say "Well, did you apply sufficient coyote urine?" And the boss is stymied. Did I? Should I? It's a brain-freeze response.

You might be asking if we applied crystallized coyote urine. Do I look like a man who'd be married to someone who strews granulated canine pee? She's a real-deal gal, which is one of the reasons I made her mine. My dad always said, "You find a girl who has a quart of the cay-ote juice around, son, you put a ring on that."

"On the spray nozzle?" I said, dewy and innocent and not yet wise in the ways of the garden.

"No, on her finger, but not the one she uses for the spray bottle trigger. I swear, you don't know a thing about the world, do you?"

I do now, except for one thing: I cannot fathom the means by which we have an unlimited supply of coyote urine available for anti-rabbit activity. I don't think there are guys with night-vision glasses following around coyotes in the forest and using Bounty towels to soak up what they leave. Nor do I think the industry has set up roadhouses where they serve beer laced with diuretics for a coyote-only clientele, and pipe the urinals to a bottling plant.

The only explanation seems to be large facilities that produce coyote urine on an industrial scale, perhaps like the movie "The Matrix," where they all slumber in pods while attached to hoses. I do not know what the coyote version of the Matrix would be like, except they would be constantly dreaming of waterfalls and tsunamis and the like, followed by ecstatic relief.

Does it leave the plant in tankers loaded on to trains? If that's so, then it's likely we would have heard of a derailment that dumped 10,000 gallons of coyote urine somewhere, and the news would be interviewing people with weeping eyes, surrounded by dogs that were going absolutely mad because a coyote the size of Godzilla was around here somewhere.

If it's not transported by tankers, then … a pipeline? Does every big garden place have the stuff on tap?

You'd think our chemical industry could come up with a synthetic coyote urine that could be turned out cheaply at great quantity, although you know they'd probably mandate that it contain 10% ethanol. There would be laws that said the bottle had to have the word "synthetic" in big red letters, which would create a market for organic coyote urine and a demand for free-range coyote urine, even though the chemical composition of the stuff was identical.

You know what would be easier than applying that stuff all the time? Besides having an actual coyote? A pill that made your dog's emissions have the quality that makes rabbits flee. The dog's out there irrigating everything, might as well put him to good use, and it would completely confuse the other dogs who sniff his marks on trees and bushes. Hold on, this has to be Birch, but it's like he's wearing a fake mustache and glasses.

Well, they'll be gone soon, and it won't matter. No more worries about the tulips being eaten by the ravenous rabbits. On to the glories of summer — when the rabbits chomp the hostas.

Unless you spray them with lynx spittle.