If you received a pet for Christmas but can’t look after it, surrender it to an animal welfare shelter, rather than turn it loose to care for itself — especially during one of the coldest times of the year.
That’s the message from Cindy Howard, a long-time advocate for rabbits abandoned at Minoru Park.
Howard spoke out following a sad discovery on Dec. 27, when she was busy doing one of her frequent sweeps of the park area and noticed a brand new, blue, rabbit cage stashed near a storage shed by the lawn bowling green.
The cage was partially covered by a sheet of plastic that appeared to have been mostly blown off by the icy winds. And inside, there was a young, small, white, male bunny that had succumbed to the frigid temperatures.
“I was hoping it was just an abandoned cage,” said Howard, who is a co-founder of Richmond’s Bandaids for Bunnies, a rabbit rescue group and No Rabbit Left Behind, a rabbit advocacy organization. She’s also the author of a children’s book called The Rabbit Rescuers.
“There was a full water bottle and a bowl full of rabbit pellets,” said Howard, adding that it was an odd sight that led her to believe the rabbit was an abandoned Christmas gift.
“Everything about the cage looked brand new and it looked like someone put him out here because they didn’t want him anymore,” Howard said. The bunny appeared to be underweight, just a couple of months old — too young for a tattoo ID — and likely died quite quickly from exposure to the harsh winter weather.
“It was a bad night the day before I found him,” Howard said.
Eyal Lichtmann, CEO of the Richmond Animal Protection Society (RAPS), said he was horrified by the news of the abandoned bunny and the sad case serves as a perfect example of a situation where the pet should have been surrendered to a shelter, rather than condemned to an uncertain plight.
“People should be bringing them in,” he said, adding the coming weeks are some of the busiest at RAPS.
