Rear View Mirror: The day the bunnies went boom

It was three years ago this weekend that Richmond’s well-known abandoned rabbit problem made the front page.

The headline “Bunny Boom” told the story of how the Nowaks had been overrun with baby rabbits after taking it in a small family of them in their townhouse complex, after noticing their expansion.

To make matters worse, the local rabbit rescues were also bursting at capacity and were powerless to help, including RAPS, which had to incinerate its rabbit shelter in previous weeks due to a rabbit disease sweeping the province at the time.

It got so bad that the Nowak family – which already had two cats and a Guinea pig at home - were getting help from one of the rabbit rescues, Rabbitats, to house the growing population of bunnies in the their backyard, which turned into a makeshift shelter in itself.

At the height of the Nowak’s private “bunny boom,” they had 10 rabbits in three crates, a pen and an eight-foot long wooden rabbit run, built by Nowak’s husband, Simon, who was a secondary school woodwork teacher.

The family even appealed to their strata council to see if they can help with spaying and neutering the rabbits, before asking the City of Richmond to step up with controlling the explosion.

However, Nowak feels, if the city’s animal shelter and local rabbit rescues can’t help, the city itself has to step up.

Rabbitats said that the rabbit population problem was not peculiar to the Nowak’s townhouse complex and was symptomatic of what’s happening across Richmond, referencing a “10-year baby boom,” where, according to biologists, every decade, the rabbit population explodes.

Asked if it should be doing more to help, the City of Richmond said at the time it was currently monitoring the situation with rabbits and had been in ongoing discussions with the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations and local animal charities.

“Unfortunately, the city is limited in what it can do in the area of rabbits as they are considered Schedule C Wildlife under provincial wildlife legislation,” said the city’s spokesperson at the time, Ted Townsend.

“The city can trap, hold, and euthanize rabbits, but not release or make available for adoption. The approach the city has taken is that of educating the public on the release of rabbits into parks and the feeding of rabbits, which are prohibited under civic bylaws.”

The city banned the sale of rabbits from stores in 2010 in a bid to deal with the recurring issue.