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Are you thinking about adding a fluffy hopping pet to your family?
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Well, today we're going to dive into the world of bunnies as pets and we're going to learn from an expert about everything you would need to know about making a good decision about whether a bunny is the right pet for you.
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So stay tuned.
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You're listening to Starlight Pet Talk, a podcast for pet parents who want the best pet care advice from cat experts, dog trainers, veterinarians and other top pet professionals who will help you live your very best life with your pets.
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We also share inspiring rescue and adoption stories from people who've taken their love of pets to the next level by getting involved in animal welfare.
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My name is Amy Castro, and I'm the founder and president of Starlight Outreach and Rescue and a columnist for Pet Age Magazine.
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I've rescued thousands of animals and helped people just like you find the right pet for their family.
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My mission is to help pet parents learn all the ways that they can care for, live with and even have fun with their pets, so they can live their very best lives and their pets can too.
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Welcome to Starlight Pet Talk.
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I'm your host, amy Castro, and my guest today is Marcy Berman.
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Marcy is the founder and executive director of Save a Bunny Rabbit Rescue, which is based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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In 1999, while walking her dog, marcy found a domestic rabbit that had been set free, otherwise known as abandoned.
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25 years later, and 5,000 rabbits saved, marcy has become an international expert on companion rabbit rescue and rehabilitation, with a special focus on trauma, abuse and neglect.
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Marcy says that companion rabbits are very much misunderstood, they're underrepresented and they're unprotected.
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They are truly the underdog.
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So, marcy, welcome to the show.
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Thank you, thanks for having me.
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Well, I appreciate you being here and I know in your introduction I said that your foray into bunny rescuing began with a walk, a walking the dog scenario, and tell us a little more about that.
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You just happened upon a bunny on the sidewalk taking a walk as well, or how did that go Well?
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I never thought I was a bunny person.
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I still don't even really consider myself a bunny person, but I was walking my dog and I saw a white and brown rabbit running around in the street and the only thing I knew about the bunny at that time was that the bunny was not a wild rabbit, because wild rabbits are not colored white because then they're target practice for predators.
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So I knew that she was.
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I found out she was a, she was somebody's pet, and it took me about an hour and a half to catch her.
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She I didn't know anything, but only experiences I had had with rabbits were not good ones, and so I had been doing some wildlife rehab with wild care and I took my dog home and I grabbed my wildlife heavy wildlife gloves and dog food because that's all I had I didn't even know what they ate and a blanket, a flashlight, and I went down and I it took me about an hour and a half to crawl under a car together, wow.
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And so I got her, and then I drove around to a guest safeway and bought all the supplies I thought I needed and of course they were garbage, because that's usually the stuff they sell at the stores.
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But the next day I went back and looked around to see who might have lost a rabbit and I I, this woman said, oh yeah, she's ours, but we don't want her.
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You can have her.
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And I had offered her 20 bucks.
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I'm like I'll give you 20 bucks for the bunny.
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She's like you can just have her.
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We don't want her.
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Wow.
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And so that started the whole lifetime achievement award for bunny rescue, I guess.
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And so she was an amazing teacher and I guess it was meant to be.
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It's not something I ever would have picked for myself, and she she was so much smarter and so much more sentient and opinionated and loving, and just everything about her opened my eyes to how unique rabbits were.
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I had no clue.
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I thought they were these cute but not very bright animals that lived in a hutch in the backyard and that was about it, and they were dumb and I hate to say that, but that was really where I started.
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And so she was just an amazing, amazing being and she wasn't with us that long.
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She was only with me for about six months because the pet sitter that I had hired, despite leaving really specific instructions, did not follow my instructions, and there's certain health issues with rabbits that you have to be very careful about.
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They're much more work than a cat or a dog, and most people don't think that, and so the rabbit passed away from a digestive problem.
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So that was a big lesson I learned, and then I make sure that everybody understands is that rabbits really require some extra care.
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So that's how it all started.
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Now it's been over 5,000 rabbits later.
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And I wild.
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And I mean rabbit rescue is not like breeding in my house of 5,000 rabbits, of course, because everybody here gets spayed and neutered.
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But that's how it started.
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That's great.
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That's great.
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So you know, it's not to say that we don't see.
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I mean I do rescue as well, mostly cats and dogs, and I've got the occasional pony or donkey.
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That that's here.
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But why is it?
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Do you think that people think that it's just okay to let your bunny go, like, like they're disposable or something?
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I think it?
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has.
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I think there's a whole number of layers to that.
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I think it starts in that society itself, including the animal community, doesn't view rabbits as being as deserving or worthy as cats and dogs, so they do view them as disposable.
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That's how society does, that's how a lot of the shelters, especially the no kill shelters, view rabbits is.
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They're sort of disposable, and so I think people also misunderstand.
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Rupert's getting a little fussy, yeah.
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For those of you who are lucky enough to be watching this on YouTube, you can see that Marcy is holding a bunny.
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That is so darn cute that he doesn't even look real.
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To me he looks like a stuffed animal and it just makes me wonder, like I can't imagine just setting him out to be predator bait, Because that's basically what you're doing, I mean, unless somebody luckily comes along like you did and catches them or goes through all that trouble.
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I think a lot of people misunderstand that companion rabbits, these domestic rabbits, are non-native.
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They are not related to jackrabbits and cock-and-tails, they can't even in a breed, and so people think that you take a rabbit and you set them free and they're just going to go and be fine and they'll usually starve to death or get picked off by a predator.
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So they are not the same as our wild rabbits.
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They are descendants of European rabbits who were brought over hundreds of years ago.
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So that's, I think, a big misperception.
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Yeah, I hope everybody who's ever thought about doing that with their bunny now listens to that and hears that.
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I could understand how somebody might think, oh well, I see bunnies outside, so why can't my bunny go outside?
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I mean, I would never do it, ignorant or not.
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It's just not the right thing to do.
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But I could kind of see where their logic might come from.
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As far as I mean, obviously you've got a bunny rescue, you've rescued 5,000 bunnies.
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I mean, how big of a bunny rescue, bunny abandonment issue is it?
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What would you say as far as bunnies that are in rescues and shelters across the US right now?
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Well, it's hard to track because I know what I see and I know what my colleagues see in the shelters.
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But one of the issues is that rabbits fall in this gray area where a farm animal people don't track them and dog and cat agencies don't track them.
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So at many shelters the euthanasia statistics and the intake statistics are dog, cat, other, which is also kind of revealing about what our society views as worthwhile companion animals or worthwhile animals to begin with.
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So rabbits get classified in with the snakes and the pigeons and the guinea pigs and the mice and everyone else, and they're also equally worthy of being tracked Right.
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I've had to push to get a lot of the shelters to track rabbits and I give kudos to San Francisco animal care and control owner park.
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You know some of the marine humane site.
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They track their rabbits, but at most shelters they don't, and at a lot of shelters they don't even charge an adoption fee for a rabbit, which is ridiculous, and they don't spay and neuter, which, when you think about any animal that really ought to get spayed or neutered before they get adopted, it should be a rabbit.
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And so there's been legislation to make sure that animals in California are fixed before they go out to adoption, but they excluded rabbits and, and so a lot of times some of the shelters that take in rabbits, they're so eager to get them out of their system that they just either adopt them out for free or they really don't screen.
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And so you know this is such a big topic that I go on forever about this, and part of it is I place a lot of Responsibility on the no kill movement for some of this, because no kill sounds great, except that it really does mean no killing an adoptable animal, and adoptable is very vague, and so for places that are privately run that find rabbits to be problematic, they're harder to place.
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You can't make any money off of rabbit Licensing and rabbit training, even though they can't be trained.
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The shelters can make money off of things like that, and they don't with rabbits, and so no kill Only includes usually adoptable cats and dogs.
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So rabbits get Left behind.
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They get left behind everywhere.
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They get left behind by the farm animal movements that left them out of prop two years ago about caging.
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They said, oh well, we'll come back for them, and then nobody did.
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And they get left out of legislation about fur, even with AB 44 in California, rabbits were used as a bargaining chip by some of the bigger agencies to say look, if you pass this legislation to protect against fur, animals will back off on Rabbits because there's a big rabbit meat and rabbit fur lobby in California, and so we ended up being one of the only groups that stood up for rabbits and it's really frustrating.
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So it's hard to get a lot of change for them if the people that we would hope would stand behind rabbits Are not there.
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Some yeah some are.
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But there's a big push for dog and cat food made out of rabbit meat Because it's a marketing.
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You know, lean protein it's a lot of BS, honestly, because we've done a lot of research on hot and cold diets and we've approached places like pet food express to ask them Not to sell it or to sell it only a special order, and they basically said they make more money Selling it, then they would if we ask people not to shop there.
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So it's a big problem where rabbits just nobody wants to deal with it and they're?
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They're kind of where cats used to be, maybe 50 years ago, where cats were this misunderstood, let them live outside, figure out their own lives, and so rabbits are way behind, yeah, in that, and I think people are afraid of them sometimes because a lot of people grew up with these rabbits that were outside, that were not fixed, that were probably really cranky, and so they.
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I didn't have good experiences, so they don't really understand how much rabbit medicine and rabbit behavior is is Moving into a more, much more modern time.
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By the way, before I go any further, I want to say that what I'm doing with Rupert, holding him here, is with his permission.
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He is a prey animal, I am a predator, and so I'm doing what I usually don't do.
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I usually don't sit and hold a rabbit in front of people because I don't want them to expect that they are going to Be able to do that with a prey animal and it's a matter of trust and he's being trained to be an ambassador.
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Bunny, see, if he likes that kind of work, then he doesn't have to do it.
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But I don't want people to expect to be able to walk around and hold a rabbit, because it's it's a gift that they give us, and it shouldn't be an expectation.
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I Well, you made several, several good points.
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I want to hit on that for just a second, because I've run into that issue and I think a lot of it goes back to just understanding not only the behavior of the species, of whatever the animal is, and not expecting it to comply with our needs we're supposed to be meeting their needs but also to realize too and I've run into this with little dogs before where agencies won't adopt out a little dog because maybe they get a little nippy with strangers If a stranger tries to pick them up and it's like, well, if you think about it from the dog's perspective or from the bunny's perspective, they're kind of helpless and so they just get ripped off the ground by whomever and flung hither and yawn and it's like you wouldn't do that to a German shepherd.
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What makes you think that that's OK to do it to a little dog or to a bunny?
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Like you said, it's something that comes with getting to know the animal, building that trust, making the animal feel safe and within their limits.
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When he's decided it's done, you put him down.
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You don't force him to endure.
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And I don't really understand why people feel like they need to impose so much of their behavior on small animals.
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And then I also wanted to just jump back too, before we get too far ahead is the whole, because now I want to call my shelters and see as far as the way that the numbers get counted you're right, it's dogs euthanized, cats euthanized, and then I know wildlife got counted.
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But yeah, where does?
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If a bunny had to be, or a bird or whatever it might be, did it even get counted?
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And that's something that people should know.
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And I have a lot of issues personally with the whole no kill thing.
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The concept is awesome, but the way that it's being implemented has a lot of problems and that's a whole episode for another show.
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But you're so right and I think people need to hear that again that no kill doesn't mean things don't get euthanized.
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No kill basically means whatever they want to define it.
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As for a lot of organizations, like, at one point one of the groups that I was working with didn't count wildlife as things that they euthanized and it's like, well, why shouldn't that count?
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It's sort of a shell game, you know.
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It's like they can make it what they want to make it based on what they include.
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Don't include what parameters they put in.
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Well, you know whether it's healthy.
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Who defines that, whether it's behaviorally appropriate, who defines that?
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Do they even know what they're doing?
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So I have a lot of issues with no kill.
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And then I also wanted to make a point too about what you said about spaying, neuter.
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And not only is it so important, I think, from the standpoint of bunnies having lots of bunny babies, but most people don't know how to sex a bunny.
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They don't even have a clue, and it's not an easy thing to.
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It's not as obvious as a dog, let's say, let's just put it that way.
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And so you know, a person gets a bunny home, has no idea whether it's spayed or neutered, or knows for a fact it's not.
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Somebody told him it was a girl.
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So they get another girl and lo and behold, it's not another girl.
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And now they've got bunnies.
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You know, I bet you, that happens a lot.
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Well, the people ask me about Easter time.
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And is Easter terrible?
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And Easter, you know, has the potential to really bring in people, to educate them.
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But what happens is and it amazes me that it happens every single year You'd think it would not happen, but you would think it would.
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It would not happen all the time.
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But people go and they get the two girls that the pet store or the breeder is so sure that they are two girls and they're hard to sex.
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Rabbits are hard to sex when they're under about seven to eight weeks.
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Now, most of the time it's illegal to sell an animal or adopt an animal out who is unweaned.
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However, rabbits get placed way too young because people want little, which is also a whole other thing.
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You really don't want little, you want big.
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You want a big, mellow bunny, but so they want to get these bunnies sold or placed while they're little.
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And they're really not weaned until they're about seven to eight weeks old, and a lot of times you'll see them being offered up at three to four weeks old, which is terrible.
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It's terrible, but again, they're not protected, and so when you get animals that young, they never, especially rabbits they don't get enough of the proper nutrition.
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And they don't get the healthy bacteria that they need from the mother's milk, and so they grow up with problems.
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They grow up with digestive problems, and they're just not as healthy as they should be.
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So what happens is is, at Easter, people go out and they get two baby bunnies for their kids or their girlfriend or whatever.
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And then rabbits become teenagers at about three months old and it's very easy to sex a male rabbit once their testicles descend, because you'll probably end up cutting this out, but they are very well endowed.
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Ok, you cannot miss what's going on down there if you know what you're looking for.
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OK.
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And so as soon as the testicles descended, around three months, the males are fertile, and so they're also fertile for a month after you neuter them.
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Oh, wow.
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So what happens is is that people go out.
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They might neuter their male, maybe not, but the males start I mean the males and females start to become dominant and humpy and things like that, because they're teenagers and so the girls usually can get fixed around four to five months old.
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But you get teenage rabbits who are really acting up or breeding right around Christmas time.
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So the Easter bunnies end up dumped at the shelters at Christmas and there's a lot of unwanted litters.
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There's a lot of teenage rabbits that were these very sweet baby bunnies that have turned into little teenage monsters who are hormonal and they're acting like a rabbit should be at a teenager and they must get fixed.
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Now, another thing with rabbits getting altered is that a lot of vets won't see rabbits because rabbits need special anesthesia.
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So the Bay Area we have a lot of really good doctors but say you're in the middle of nowhere, there are not vets that know how to do this and rabbits are fragile under anesthesia.
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And so they don't want to spay and neuter the rabbits because they think the rabbits going to die.
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So they end up not fixing the rabbits and sending them out intact.
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We've had rabbits come in from shelters that have been there left with another male that give birth from being in a shelter, intact with each other, and that's just creating more the same problem.
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But if you get your free rabbit on Craig's list and then you want to go get her fixed at a private vet, it's going to cost you between 600 to 1000 bucks to get your bunny fixed because of the anesthesia.
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There are no grants, there's no freebies, there's nothing out there for rabbits.
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So we get them fixed through our veterinarians and it's not quite as expensive as that and a lot of the better shelters, spay and neuter.
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But, someone who gets their free rabbit off of Craig's list is not going to go spend that amount of money and then if you don't fix your rabbit especially the females they have an 80% chance of getting cancer by the time there's three.
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So we see a lot of rabbits who end up in the shelters, who are five or six years old, that were dumped by people and when we get them in to get spayed they have masses.
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They have uterine masses or mammary masses or something, and then we get them out and then they have a 50-50 chance.
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But it's really sad and all of this is preventable if you go to a rescue to get your rabbit and you get a little bit educated before you go out and get a pet.
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I try to remind people that rabbits are very similar to horses.
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So horses require a lot of money, expert care and they're not easy, and so rabbits and horses are actually more similar in a lot of ways than rabbits, cats and dogs, because both rabbits and horses are prey, they have similar digestive systems.
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Whereas horses might get colic, rabbits will get bloat.
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Rabbits' teeth grow throughout their whole life.
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So there's a lot of urban myths that you have to cut the rabbit's teeth and you don't.
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You absolutely do not want to do that.
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Some of the rabbits that are fancy breeds end up with bad teeth because they're made to look a certain way.
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They smush the face in, they flop the ears.
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You know, floppy-ear rabbits are not natural, they're man-made.
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Right.
00:22:31.269 --> 00:22:35.381
A prey animal is made with floppy ears, where they can't see and they can't hear.
00:22:36.191 --> 00:22:45.432
But rabbits are not a basic starter pet at all and they're not great for kids either, and I really wish that this is.
00:22:45.432 --> 00:23:00.583
One of my biggest wishes is that other groups that work with other animals would step up and help, because it's really asking too much of a couple of small rabbit rescue groups to educate the whole world about rabbit care.
00:23:00.583 --> 00:23:04.036
Yeah, and there's just not the resources.
00:23:04.036 --> 00:23:05.638
There aren't grants, there aren't.
00:23:05.638 --> 00:23:10.993
You know, there's no Maddie's fund, there's nothing other than individual donors.
00:23:10.993 --> 00:23:15.067
It's just very hard to get the word out about them.
00:23:15.737 --> 00:23:27.462
Well, and I know we I mean that's one of the reasons we're doing this podcast is not just this episode per se, but the whole podcast itself is all about education to get pets good homes and keep pets in good homes.
00:23:27.634 --> 00:23:36.833
And I think you know it's so important that people hear what you said, because I think so many people do think that bunnies are a starter pet and they're not.
00:23:36.972 --> 00:23:45.199
If you're doing it right and I think that's the key, you know the expense and the care is all about giving the proper care for the animal.
00:23:45.199 --> 00:23:53.904
We just did an episode on the five welfare needs of animals, just in general, and the fact that people really need to educate themselves.
00:23:53.904 --> 00:24:05.743
I mean there's plenty of information you can find if you're looking for it proper information about bunnies and what's the appropriate habitat, what's the appropriate diet, why it's so important to spay and neuter them, et cetera, et cetera.
00:24:05.743 --> 00:24:10.632
And people just need to educate themselves and not do this spontaneous.
00:24:10.632 --> 00:24:22.382
And I'll be the first one to admit I did it when my and it wasn't really for my daughter, it was really more for me as an animal person, but I was coming out of a Kmart because I was getting my daughter's baby pictures.
00:24:22.382 --> 00:24:35.527
This is 30 years ago, Okay, and getting her baby pictures or it probably was an Easter picture or something done, because she was born in March and there was a guy with a pickup truck and he had a crate full of bunnies.
00:24:35.734 --> 00:24:41.463
And when I say full of bunnies, I'm talking about Don't, don't, don't, tell me yeah, because I already know yeah.
00:24:42.775 --> 00:25:04.083
So I felt so bad for the bunnies, especially one that was on the very bottom of the stack, that I just basically bought him right there on the spot, had not planned, and I'm an experienced animal care person and I'd worked for a vet for eight years, so I, you know, I knew some of the basics, but I certainly didn't know all of what needed to be involved and I also didn't realize how long bunnies live.
00:25:04.083 --> 00:25:14.209
That bunny, I think the bunny well, let's put it this way it lived long enough that I want to say it was over 10 years that it lived.
00:25:14.209 --> 00:25:21.564
I mean, it was a long, a long commitment and a lot of things that you have to do to make their life worthwhile for them to live.
00:25:21.564 --> 00:25:27.825
And living in a hutch or you know, or in a fish tank in somebody's bedroom is not a life for a bunny rabbit.
00:25:28.876 --> 00:25:29.760
Now it's terrible.
00:25:29.760 --> 00:25:35.826
And then also there's a lot of really bad information out there about bunnies.
00:25:35.826 --> 00:26:04.483
And if you really want to learn about rabbit care and I would bet you to some extent that this is and I'm just putting it out there, it's probably similar with other rescue groups is, if you really want to know the most accurate information, the most modern, the most cost-effective is to look at a rescue group, a good rescue group's website, not a breeder website, because breeder's, their whole philosophy is different.
00:26:04.483 --> 00:26:15.355
There's this about what the rabbit looks like and how to keep the coat shiny and what the show quality is and all that kind of stuff, and it's very.
00:26:15.355 --> 00:26:18.945
A lot of it is very old fashioned for age is really old fashioned.
00:26:19.075 --> 00:26:20.721
It's an agricultural group.
00:26:20.721 --> 00:26:24.579
They have meat pan rabbits, they have meat rabbits.
00:26:24.579 --> 00:26:29.326
So these agricultural groups and these breeders put out bad information.
00:26:29.326 --> 00:26:32.621
Plus, there's bad information out on the.
00:26:32.621 --> 00:26:35.487
You know the internet anyway for stuff.
00:26:35.487 --> 00:26:39.965
It's almost like if you were to go on the internet and you said, how do I parent my child?
00:26:39.965 --> 00:26:44.884
You would get a million different things and some of them are good and some of them aren't.
00:26:44.884 --> 00:26:45.686
But the what the rescue?
00:26:46.997 --> 00:26:50.005
Yeah, you really want to know the source and the legitimacy of the source.
00:26:50.645 --> 00:26:50.906
Right.
00:26:50.906 --> 00:27:00.502
So the rescues are trying to deal with medical issues, behavioral issues for the least expensive way they can and the longest lasting.
00:27:00.502 --> 00:27:05.506
I have several volunteers who've had rabbits that live to be over 16.
00:27:05.506 --> 00:27:12.847
I have a 15 year old rabbit who's here and they can live a really long time.
00:27:12.847 --> 00:27:16.119
And so you want to be prepared for that.
00:27:16.119 --> 00:27:43.622
Financially, space wise, emotionally, you need to know you're getting into a major commitment, and so when we have people coming looking to adopt a rabbit for a child, we want to make sure that the parent is really into this, and so if they're not, then foster homes are a great option, because that helps us free up space to rescue other rabbits and then people have a good experience.
00:27:43.622 --> 00:27:51.227
We also will select the fosters, so we will put in bunnies that are harder to place or shy or they need something.
00:27:51.227 --> 00:27:58.656
So it's a win-win that they foster and then they're not in it for 10 to 15 years and that's fine, but it does.
00:27:58.856 --> 00:28:10.847
It is a problem when people get their kid a bunny and their kid is 16 or whatever, and the bunny gets dumped at an older age at a shelter.
00:28:10.847 --> 00:28:12.097
They grieve.
00:28:12.097 --> 00:28:16.183
People don't understand how emotionally complex rabbits are.
00:28:16.183 --> 00:28:22.826
They're very, very sensitive and emotionally intuitive.
00:28:22.826 --> 00:28:33.727
So it's hard on them when they get dumped and they do grieve, and they can grieve to death when they lose their friend or they're dumped at a shelter somewhere and feel abandoned.
00:28:33.727 --> 00:28:35.962
Oh, you know, I was going to mention something.
00:28:35.962 --> 00:28:45.491
One of the things that I try to do when I'm talking about rabbits you'll probably notice this is that I always say he or she, even if I don't know the sexes.
00:28:45.491 --> 00:28:53.067
I won't use the word it only because I want to avoid somebody looking at a rabbit as a it.
00:28:54.035 --> 00:29:03.165
We've talked about some of the challenges, obviously, in caring for bunnies, and that they do require a significant amount of care and understanding and education.
00:29:03.165 --> 00:29:05.199
What makes all that worth it?
00:29:05.199 --> 00:29:08.275
Why do you feel like bunnies are such great companions?
00:29:09.338 --> 00:29:12.432
Well, I think they're great companions for the right home.
