Animal Shelters Confront Abandoned Bunny Boom

The metal condo is tall enough that a visitor could find herself nose to twitching nose with Billy the bunny, one of a sizable fluffle of rescued rabbits awaiting adoption in an alcove at the Southampton Animal Shelter Foundation in Hampton Bays. (A group of bunnies is called a fluffle.)

With lush tan fur, the classic long, velvety ears and cute pink nose, Billy looks cuddly, like his neighbors in cages around the room, especially rabbit kittens Ali and Dani in the cage next door.

Rabbits look cuddly, but they’re usually not. “They bite, they scratch, they poop and you can’t pet them,” according to Lori Ketcham of the Save the Animals Rescue Foundation, an all-volunteer organization known as STAR that rescues abused, neglected and abandoned rabbits.

Prey animals, rabbits are fearful and nervous creatures that don’t want to be manhandled. Like the personnel at the shelter, Ms. Ketcham has seen a huge surge in both abandoned and surrendered bunnies post-pandemic.

Beatrix Parash, the interim director at the animal shelter in Hampton Bays, calls it a bunny boom. People who bought the bunnies are asking to surrender them, and strays released into backyards are multiplying, leaving the shelter with more than double the cadre of rabbits it normally sees, alongside a lengthy surrender waiting list. As soon as one bunny is adopted out or placed in a foster home, another one arrives to take its place. Ms. Parash said staff members are negotiating with people asking, “Can you wait just two more weeks?”

Their reputation as quick breeders is no joke. One night the shelter took in two rabbits that had been outside in Flanders, and by the next morning there were nine babies. A lot of the shelter’s resources and time are devoted to caring for the rabbits, some of which have arrived ill. It can take a volunteer an entire day to clean all their cages.

Like many rescue organizations, the shelter spays or neuters and vaccinates the animals before they can be adopted out. Sick bunnies are treated, meaning those costs mount up as well. The shelter is an open-admission facility and will take any animal in the town regardless of age, behavior, or medical condition, Ms. Parash explained. “We will take the more challenging cases,” she said. As a no-kill shelter, it also is asked to take surrenders other shelters might refuse. They’ve gotten requests from across the country.

At All About Rabbits Rescue in Queens, founder Vivian Barna said that while people with pet owner’s remorse who abandon rabbits aren’t a new phenomenon — think post-Easter second thoughts — her organization has seen an uptick in calls since the COVID-19 shutdown. “It’s much worse now,” she acknowledged. “And there are not enough shelters to take them.”

The rescue has had calls from Suffolk County and has taken in over 100 rabbits, Ms. Barna said.

“The best we can figure,” Ms. Ketcham explained, “everybody was working at home and thought, ‘Let’s get a pet.’ Now they’re back to work and rabbits are turning up everywhere. On a daily basis, we’re getting calls about rabbits and guinea pigs people don’t want anymore.”

With the pandemic leaving the organization short on both volunteers and donations, Ms. Ketcham noted that STAR normally rescues wildlife and typically accepted domestic rabbits only when a situation was dire. Now, she said, calls with pleas for help are a daily occurrence.

All the rescue organizations are slammed, volunteer April Overholser from the Long Island Rabbit Rescue Group said. In August alone, she got calls about 37 abandoned rabbits. Then they got calls for people looking to rehome 100 additional rabbits they didn’t want anymore.

With resources stretched at each volunteer agency, she said, “We’re ending up with more abandoned rabbits with nowhere to go. People just leave them in a box at the door.”

Ms. Parash reported one local resident has brought abandoned rabbits he found into the shelter three times, there were that many released in his neighborhood. He just kept finding rabbits running around in his backyard.

A pure white bunny named Casper was the third one found in that location.

Helping the Hampton Bays shelter set up “condos” for the rabbits became a pet project for Ms. Overholser, as the numbers of abandoned bunnies burgeoned. “They’re doing an outstanding job,” she said of the local shelter’s effort to care for the critters.

A Ridge resident who fosters 10 rabbits in her own home, Ms. Overholser echoed what other volunteers surmised: Potential pet owners don’t realize what’s involved in caring for a rabbit. Veterinarian expenses can be more than those for a dog or cat, she noted. “You have to go to rabbit-savvy vets who deal with exotics.” A rabbit has to have a specific diet and accouterments like chew toys, or they’ll do their teething on the furniture. They require hay and fresh greens, plus lots of exercise.

Some pet owners become discouraged when the animals didn’t respond in a way they want. For example, Ms. Overholser noted that a person picking up a rabbit to snuggle feels to the animal like a predatory hawk is snatching it from a meadow. It will kick and bite.

Speaking of meadows, the volunteer emphasized that domestic rabbits belong indoors. They can’t handle extremes in temperature and are especially susceptible to parasitic infestations. They’re delicate enough that another animal circling the hutch can literally scare them to death, by precipitating a heart attack. Abandoning a domestic rabbit to the elements is, she said, “a death sentence. And it’s a horrible way to die.”

“What we promote here, overall,” Ms. Parash emphasized, “is responsible pet ownership. I think a lot of people don’t realize the responsibility that’s involved, of taking care of that little animal for its entire life.” The average lifespan for a domestic rabbit is five to 10 years, depending on breed. The shelter handles small animals like guinea pigs, hamsters, chinchillas, plus birds and recently adopted out a bearded dragon. “We never had so many small animals at once,” Ms. Parash marveled.

As the numbers in the Hampton Bays facility surged, Ms. Parash recalled, they learned other rescue agencies were also grappling with an overabundance of bunnies. One Long Island veterinarian told her she was performing 15 surgeries per day, spaying and neutering rescued rabbits.

“Since January, we’ve had 39 rabbits already,” said Venessa Herdter, an adoption coordinator at the shelter. Sixteen were surrendered and 23 were strays.

“We average at the top, six,” Ms. Parash compared.

“This is by far the most owner surrender requests we’ve ever gotten,” Ms. Herdter reported.

Some bunnies came in sick and had to be treated. Long Island Rabbit Rescue took in a hospice rabbit that arrived a SASF with pneumonia.

Further stress was put on rescue organizations last summer, when in July, volunteers found 30 bunnies had been dumped in Calverton. Half of them died. Kathi Willi, 59, and William Melton, 52, of Ridge were arrested and charged with animal abandonment, a misdemeanor under Agriculture and Markets Law, punishable by up to a year in jail. It was unclear as to whether the couple was breeding the animals or simply hoarding them.

“People have to understand, if they’re going to have or breed these animals, they have to be able to control the breeding,” Chief Roy Gross of the Suffolk County Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals said. “If you’re going to have rabbits, it’s your responsibility. Have them spayed or neutered. If you’re going to breed or hoard, you’ll be charged with animal cruelty or neglect if you dump them.”

There was good news on the bunny front this week. The Riverhead Town Board voted unanimously to ban the sale of commercially-bred rabbits in its jurisdiction as part of a broader ban prohibiting the sale of commercially bred dogs, cats, and rabbits.

“The Southampton Animal Shelter Foundation applauds the Riverhead Town Board for unanimously adopting a ban on the sale of commercially bred dogs, cats and rabbits. We encourage our township and state to join a growing number of towns, cities and states across the country who are passing laws to prevent inhumane puppy, kitten and rabbit mills from selling animals to pet stores,” Ms. Parash said.