More babies!!

A few weeks ago, I told you about the rabbits that we've been working to rescue from the property of a local restaurant.  As of this past Saturday, we had caught 16 and as far as we knew, there were only 2 left out there.   With temperatures reaching the low 100's this past week, we were desperate to get the rest of them to safety.

Well, the 2 that we know of are still out there somewhere, but this morning we were able to trap 4 babies!  One of them was in such bad shape (the poor thing was just crawling with ticks!) that we opted to just keep that one in our "sick bay" and monitor his health. The other three have been cleaned up and are going into foster care tomorrow. 
The oldest of those 3 is probably about 8 weeks old or so.  The other two appear to be from the same litter (they still fit in the palm of your hand!) and are probably about 4 weeks old.   

This brings our total (just from this ONE property) up to 20!  And as I said earlier, there are still at least 2 out there...If they're a male/female pair, they'll continue to have litters every 30 days until we can get them.  

We also took in two babies last week from an unrelated incident.  A man found a pregnant female in his yard, and she gave birth to 6 babies.  The man didn't know what to do with them so he set them up outside, and with the terrible heat, one of the babies passed away, probably from heat stroke.  Of the remaining 5, two had nasty cuterebra larvae in their necks (I assure you, it's disgusting), the other three were doing OK so the guy decided to hang onto them for a while to help us out (and has since moved them inside!) 

We found an adult female running around on a school playground (again, on that day where it was about 107°), one man turned over his extremely handsome black & white rex named Merlin, because he was moving out of the country and couldn't keep him.   A beautiful bonded pair was turned over to us last weekend; a little mixed breed girl was turned over 2 weeks ago, plus we have 5 of the "Restaurant Bunnies" (not counting the three we caught this morning, which are presently sitting in my living room).

Whew!!  We're just so overwhelmed...and the sad part is that this pretty much happens to us every year right around this time.  You'd think we'd be used to it by now!

Today was the annual Hop Along Hollow Tag Sale.   We started doing this a few years back and have made anywhere from $400 - $900 in the past.   I'll admit, I could have done more to help promote it this year, but it seems that time is just so short for all of us these days.   We ended up taking in a little less than $200 this year, but it's money we didn't have this morning, so we're grateful.

Tag Sales are easy money and hard work, both at the same time.   It's easy to collect a bunch of stuff, put it out on the lawn, and take money from people willing to cart the stuff away.   But you have to be everywhere at once, and even today with six people helping out (myself included) some of our stuff managed to sneak away from us unpaid for.  It's hard to imagine someone stealing from a tag sale in general, but from one that is publicized as a tag sale for a charity?   Seriously people?   We lost probably $100 worth of stuff today because, quite frankly, you just can't be everywhere.   And we noticed that people will take a lot of small items and pile them on top of larger ones then just give us a $20 and leave.   We're grateful, thinking they just donated $20 for $5 worth of crap, but in the end, they just walked off with something valued at $50 hidden underneath the smaller stuff.   And then you get the opposite...the people who come in and pick out one thing, marked $1, and donate $10.    We've only had something stolen from one other tag sale before and it was one of our cell phones.  

Will we stop doing tag sales because of this?  Absolutely not.   It gets us outside for one, and it gets our name out there for another.   You meet some really nice people, and a lot of folks admit that it never occurred to them that Rabbit Rescues exist...so you get to teach them a little something while you're at it.   Can we guarantee that people won't walk off with stuff from time to time?  No.   But the way I see it...if you have to steal from a charity, then you're way worse off than we are.

I wasn't going to share this story because it's slightly on the gross side...But I figure I might as well and maybe it will help perpetuate the lesson that domestic animals should not be left to fend for themselves.

About a month ago, the Stratford Fire Department showed up at Hop Along Hollow's doorstep, in the middle of the night, to deliver to us a small white bunny they had picked up from the parking lot of a local restaurant.   The bunny had been dumped there by someone and some of the local kids were throwing rocks at the poor thing.  Imagine walking through NYC and throwing rocks at the homeless people?   Obviously, that's not OK...but apparently it's perfectly acceptable to do it to an animal. 

We took the little guy in, got him cleaned up and he's now waiting for adoption.

But the story doesn't end there.   Apparently, there were "a couple" of rabbits who were dumped in that parking lot....and now there are several babies who have just started venturing out of their nest.   I'd say they are maybe 8-12 weeks old.

We haven't been able to catch them all but we have picked up two.  They are two of the saddest cases I've seen in my almost 6 years at Hop Along Hollow.  Both had severe skin irritation/injuries....we aren't sure if they fought each other or if they were attacked by another animal...but regardless, the skin got really infected and of course, attracted flies.    They both had really serious cases of fly strike which, if you don't know, is when flies lay eggs in a living animal so that the larvae (aka maggots) have a nice warm, moist place to live and they can feed right off the host animal.  

It's horribly disgusting....these two little things were basically being eaten alive.  

What's more disgusting, is that I got to watch Linda sit there and pull maggots off of one of them (the other is now in foster care).  I can assure you, it's not "cool" or "interesting" or one of those things people refer to as "car wrecks" ....you know "it's so gross but I can't look away!"     This was NOT one of those things.  

He has been named Carrots and he's well on his way to recovery now!  After 2 long weeks, he's been de-bugged, de-matted, well tended to.  Next, he will be neutered and then put up for adoption.

I didn't WANT to share this story because it is disgusting and I'm sure that you all some pretty gory visuals in your minds.   But I started this blog because I wanted people to know why I do what I do....why I react the way I do when they talk about animals as if they're disposable; as if they don't matter.   A life is a life and ALL lives should be treated with respect.  

The moral of today's story is that domestic animals should NEVER be released into the wild to fend for themselves.   Rabbits have been domesticated for hundreds of years.  Most of the wild rabbit reflexes and instincts are gone.  If a rabbit lives with a dog or cat in their home, and is then dumped outside and comes across a feral one, do you think they are going to know they should run away when they've never had to before?   If you bring your animal food twice a day, and provide a bowl of water for it and then release it into the wild, do you think it's going to know how to obtain these provisions?   Most people can't even survive a day or two without their cell phone....nevermind if we took away your food source.   As I've said before, just be responsible. 

Here's poor Carrots when he first came in:

And here he is now, looking MUCH better!