Editor's note: The following story has been updated to clarify claims made by Pettit about the Barrie OSPCA. The Ontario SPCA Barrie Animal Centre is currently undergoing renovations and continues to help animals through its Community Support Services. Officials there say they have assisted Pettit with animal care supplies and have offered care and re-homing support at their animal centre locations.
For the last several months, Innisfil resident Erika Pettit has been rescuing bunnies that have been illegally dumped in local parks in the area.
In May, BarrieToday featured a story on Pettit and Barrie resident Autumn Seadon, two animal advocates who were hoping by bringing attention to the situation, it would improve.
Since then, Pettit has been working to find the rescued bunnies' homes, and with one of the bunnies turning out to be a girl, it ended up having a litter.
“When we collected the rabbits, we were able to sex some of them right away, but we’re amateurs and long story short, not all of them were sexed and one ended up being a girl,” said Pettit. “She gave birth to 12 babies, three of them died, so we have nine babies that need homes.”
With the cost of fixing a bunny, a necessary step when raising them, being $800, Pettit needs help in getting these bunnies fixed and vaccinated all while finding them “loving forever homes.”
“We’ve been trying to get them spayed and neutered for a while but we can’t find a vet right now through the SPCA that does small animal spaying and neuters. So right now, if we take them to a vet, it’ll be $800 per rabbit. We’re in desperate need of help," she said.
The most important aspect of the situation is that the rabbits have to be fixed or it can lead to issues.
“What ends up happening is people get rabbits as gifts and think they’re so small and cute like hamsters and can be kept in a cage, but they’re much more like cats and dogs,” says Pettit. “Once they grow out of the cute little fluffy bunny stage they go to their ‘terrible twos,’ like a toddler. They can become destructive and aggressive, and they want to reproduce and they’ll start chewing the furniture, tossing things, and making noise—like a puppy. Once they get fixed, they completely mellow out.”
Part of the bigger issue of bunnies not being fixed and the lack of education on how to raise them is that they end up being dumped in communities like Innisfil and Barrie, which has a snowball effect, says Pettit.
“A lot of people don’t know this and when the cute little bunny they get becomes destructive, they just let them go in the wild,” Pettit said. “What ends up happening is they end up either succumbing to the elements or they reproduce with each other and have a litter every 32 days. There’s a campus in B.C. where this has happened for decades and there’s a feral rabbit population, there’s one in Alberta as well.
“It becomes a town issue because it attracts more coyotes to the area, and they hunt cats and dogs as well. These bunnies don’t survive, and they suffer when they’re let into the wild. These rabbits are bred to be indoor domestic breeds, so they have no instincts. I tell people I’m from the city and if you put me up north in the middle of the woods, I will die.”
Originally, Pettit and the other volunteers helping to rescue the rabbits had the help of rescue organizations but they’re now at peak capacity with the sheer number of rabbits being dumped.
“It’s happening everywhere,” said Pettit. “At this point, I’ve never seen anything like it and neither have the rescues. Not only are the shelters full, but the fosters are full as well — they literally have no more room to take them.”
With the cost of living becoming a larger issue on every level, Pettit believes it’s playing a role in the illegal dumping of rabbits.
“That’s the problem, people are financially strapped and can’t afford it,” she said. “Hay has gone up in price and even the paper bedding litter has gone up—it’s gone up like $3 in the past six months. I can understand because it’s hitting us financially as well, but to just release them is passing the buck onto someone else. Not only is it destroying the environment, but it’s causing health issues as well. There’s the rabbit hemorrhagic disease virus in Ontario that’s 100 per cent fatal and highly contagious for rabbits. They can spread disease.”
The situation is a vicious circle according to Pettit; people get rabbits as pets without knowing the importance of fixing them and the costs, they look for the easy way out by dumping them, they breed or get rescued, the rescues fill up, there’s too many to be rescued, and eventually it creates feral rabbits within the community which impact the local environment.
To help mitigate the issue, Pettit is hoping community members are able to step up and adopt the rescued rabbits.
“They make wonderful pets, they’re the sweetest,” she said. “They’re like having a combination of a dog and a cat. They come to you when you call them, they’re playful, they’re really intelligent. They’re incredibly gentle and fun. They make wonderful pets but like any other pet, they come with responsibilities and have special needs. We want to find them good homes and to get people to stop dumping them.”
