'My router has stopped working."

"Do you know why?"

"The power cord has come to grief."

"How did that happen?"

"Well ... , my children have a pet rabbit."

"These things happen," said the helpdesk guy.

It's hard to know what possessed Lily, a colleague's lop-eared rabbit, to attack the power cord and the ethernet cable. Perhaps she took exception to the router's incessantly flashing green lights. Or, by some sort of sixth sense, had reacted to the electromagnetic radiation of the wires as a threat needing to be dealt to. Maybe she was just hungry.

We'll never know. But her attack was swift and, in its two-pronged nature, devastating. Telecom Xtra sent a replacement router with new power cord, but my colleague still had the problem of the severed ethernet cable that ran from the downstairs router to the upstairs computer room.

He baulked at the $200 quote for an upstairs phone jack extension so decided to repair the cable himself.

In the best tradition of Kiwi DIY, he cut off the bite marked end, and persevered in the difficult task of slotting eight tiny wires in the right order into an ethernet clip.

It didn't work, but it was a sterling effort. Imagine his distress however, when, with a new power card and replacement ethernet cable, broadband refused to be restored to his household.

By now his daughters, in their sixth week of deprivation - no Facebook, Bebo, YouTube, MSN or downloadable music, not to mention having to go to friends' houses to do their homework - were feeling like pariahs.

Another call to the helpdesk fixed the problem - somehow his internet access had been "locked out" at Xtra's end also. Could Lily's bite have reached that far down the line?

It's not the first time I've heard of animal sabotage of the internet. A gentleman farmer I know out Mangatawhiri way had his fibre optic cable attacked by cows. He had run some conduit across a paddock to a WiMAX, (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) station he and some neighbours had built to get broadband to their rural lifestyle.

As he points out, the great thing about DIY fibre is that there's there is no risk to life and limb because there is no electricity flowing in it. Farmers are also quite used to laying out reticulation systems, so for them buying the cable and unrolling it is as easy as banging in a fencepost.