The honest truth about those adorible bunnies.
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The Great Bunny Rescue of 2006
www.bestfriends.org
1,000 bunnies and counting!
March 1, 2006 : 12:00 AM
Bunny Rescue
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Best Friends Animal Society
5001 Angel Canyon Road
Kanab, UT. 84741
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It’s the craziest bunny drama Best Friends has ever seen – 1,000 fluffy bunny rabbits bouncing around one backyard! They’re lively and playful, and they have a whole world to themselves with the snow-capped mountains of Reno providing the view. But their plea? “Give us some room!”
Space is tight for these guys, and more bunnies are born every day. They’re fighting each other for elbow room. Boys are getting into brawls. Moms are leaving their litters right on the lawn because there’s no more room deep in the tunnels, where the babies are safer. And 1,000 is only an estimate. Nobody could ever sit down and count all these rabbits one by one. They’re hidden under your feet, burrowed into tunnels; what you see is only a fraction of what you’ve got!
Years ago, Best Friends took 178 rabbits from a woman who said she never knew bunnies could be spayed and neutered. But that was nothing compared to this! One hundred and seventy-eight would be a cool and comfortable number of bunnies next to this fiasco. So how did it happen?
It started with a rescuer who took in homeless bunnies, neutered them, and gave them nice lives. She did this for 28 years. But then her health began to fail, and nobody seemed to read the figurative sign on the door that said, “Don’t drop any more bunnies off at this address!” Instead, folks kept dumping them over the fence. The rescuer didn’t know how to return the little care packages to the people who had dumped them. And she was too ill to take care of them, or to stay on top of the neutering, or even to tell sometimes that another rabbit had been dumped in her yard. As the uninvited guests began to multiply, she went in search of help.
By the time Best Friends got the call, Debby Widolf, the Bunny House manager, couldn’t quite believe her ears. In fact, she didn’t believe them! She could have sworn the woman said there were about 80 bunnies. Debby gave her the names of rescue groups who might be able to help, and pleasantly wished her luck. The woman called back. Had the list been helpful? Ummmm … well … in a way … sure. Rescue groups were able to take a few rabbits, and that was nice, but, um, there were still about 800 left. There were still – what did she say? Eight left? No. Eight hundred and multiplying!
Debby couldn’t believe it. Of course there were no rescue groups that could take 800 rabbits. Those poor fuzzy creatures! What could be done for them? What could she begin to recommend? It was time for drastic measures. It was time to put together perhaps the most ambitious bunny rescue ever conceived. It was time to send out a group of Best Friends folks to build shelters for those rabbits, to organize spays and neuters, to treat the ones who were sick, and to put together an adoption campaign. It was time for … Team Bunny! Stay tuned for the next chapter in the bunny rescue saga.…
Article by Elizabeth Doyle. Photos by Debby Widolf .
I will continue when I too find out what happens to them!
