The struggle of cute domestic bunnies dumped in the wild brought together Autumn Seadon and Erika Pettit, two complete strangers who can’t stand animal abuse.
“They are gentle, loving and smart creatures, but they are not meant to be in cages like a dog or cat, and people have very little clue about how to take care of them,” said Pettit, an Innisfil resident, after successfully rescuing a dumped pet rabbit from Lennox Park in Barrie last weekend.
She ended up at the park because of a post from Seadon, a vet tech and Barrie resident, who had just rescued another bunny in the area.
“I reached out to Autumn offering help because, sadly, I’ve captured dumped rabbits before,” said Pettit.
Working as a team, the pair found four more bunnies, including the one first found by Seadon, a domestic rabbit breed called Flemish giant.
When Seadon spotted the first bunny, she knew it was a domestic large-breed rabbit, as its demeanour was different from wild rabbits. For a moment, she was optimistic she had found someone’s runaway pet and would reunite them soon. But hours later she realized how wrong she was.
“There were two other large brown bunnies hiding, terrified, under cars, a grey one shaking under the children’s play set and a black bunny seen going up to people’s doors who lived near the park, clearly seeking safety,” Seadon said.
She and Pettit asked for help from rabbit rescues, but all of this happened during the long weekend, and everything was closed. Then, they found kind-hearted people who stepped up to temporarily foster three of the five bunnies — one bunny each.
“We are still looking to find loving homes for these darling, large-breed bunnies,” said Seadon.
Pet bunnies don’t do well in the wild, Pettit says, as they often succumb to the elements, cars or predators. They often suffer from ear mites and ticks, and can’t survive on their own. For instance, the one she is nursing back to health was found skinny, weighing eight pounds, just half of its normal weight.
The Flemish giants rescued by Seadon and Pettit were in bad shape, some of them with fur missing due to urine stains and sore hocks.
“People are sentencing these innocent animals to death. It’s simply not fair. It’s inhumane to those little guys,” said Seadon.
Pettit also noted most domestic rabbits are not “fixed,” which means they could reproduce in the wild.
“There are places in the world where people dumped domestic bunnies, and they have populated the area and are now rampant and feral,” Pettit said, mentioning a feral domestic rabbit colony in British Columbia.
She wants people to understand bunnies don’t make good pets for children, and to be educated about the consequences of dumping pet bunnies in the wild.
“This is clearly an animal abuse and abandonment situation and, sadly, it happens all the time,” she said.
Pettit, who has already adopted two rescue bunnies, said she is tired of trying to make things right.
“I’ve been awake till the late hours of the evening catching up on work because this has taken up so much of my time.”
Seadon believes this was a larger dump of “unwanted” or perhaps over-bred rabbits.
“The sad thing is that this happens yearly to individual rabbits who do not survive in the wild. It’s not something that is addressed enough,” she said.
Pettit found a perfect quote in The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: “People have forgotten this truth, but you mustn’t forget it. You become responsible forever for what you’ve tamed.”
