Day 2 - Rabbits

Today, I was driving through the sanctuary on my way to lunch, when I saw a woman driving a Jeep with a cockatoo on her shoulder. (I recognized her as Wendy from Feathered Friends). When I arrived at the lunch room, I found a guy pushing a stroller with a GIANT bunny in it. The bunny's name is Humphrey Bogart and he weighs in at just over 16 lbs. I've never seen anything like this! It's a level of dedication that I've never personally witnessed.

I spent the day with Michelle at a yurt filled with bunnies. Some are friendly, some are shy, some are basically feral. All of these bunnies came from one woman. One woman in Reno who believed that she loved each of them. Then the woman got sick and her daughter called Best Friends for assistance. She explained that her mother had hundreds of rabbits and she was ill and couldn't care for them. Best Friends showed up and found over 1000 rabbits at the woman's home! Now those bunnies call Kanab, Utah home.

After a fun filled morning of cleaning cages, I got the chance to chop up apples to distribute to all of the bunnies for treats. It was fun, if a little bit disappointing. I'm used to dogs - who see treats and can't get to you fast enough. Most of the bunnies would cower in the boxes, tiny tents, or hay castles in their enclosures. Because they'd been living with a hoarder, they haven't had a lot of interraction with humans, and they're still learning to trust. So we'd throw the apple pieces, and maybe they'd be brave and hop over to pick it up, or maybe they'd hide and wait for us to move on.

What surprised me the most was learning that rabbits have to be introduced and evaluated in the same way that dogs are - rabbits won't just automatically get along with any rabbit they share space with. And if they don't get along, they fight. Rabbit fights are not pretty. Apparently, in the wild, they're known to go for the genitals! Yikes. I'm ready to get back to dogs.