A rabbit scampers across Northeast 27th Street in central Vancouver’s Ogden neighborhood. The neighborhood has been overrun with domestic rabbits for the past couple of years, after it appears someone released their pets into the wild. Alisha Jucevic/The Columbian Photo Gallery
Central Vancouver’s Ogden neighborhood has a bunny problem, or a bunny blessing, depending on how you look at it.
The neighborhood, just south of Fourth Plain Boulevard, is overrun with domestic rabbits that, absent families and homes, have turned feral. You may have heard of a similar problem in Cannon Beach, Ore., where the city is filled with rabbits.
No rabbit census has been conducted in the neighborhood so details are fuzzy on the numbers and origins of the furry intruders. Neighborhood lore is that someone — “down that way,” people say, pointing vaguely to the east — released a pair of rabbits years ago. And, like a lagomorphic Adam and Eve, that original pair did what bunnies do best: breed.
Today, collective neighborhood opinion is that there are several dozen rabbits in the area. Carrie Schienle, interim chairwoman of the neighborhood association, once heard of someone counting 200 while on an evening walk. This reporter spotted about 30 on an afternoon visit to the neighborhood; three or four hopping through this yard, two or three huddled under that truck.
“The people that have dogs and gardens don’t like it,” Schienle said. “Some people feed them and have little bunny huts for them.”
Lisa Feder, vice president and director of shelter operations at the Humane Society for Southwest Washington, warned that domestic rabbits are sensitive animals that don’t fare well on their own. Changes in temperature can be hard on rabbits, for example. They also require specific diets, and they don’t have the survival instincts of their wild cousins, she said.
“While they can reproduce at a very rapid rate, they have to have specific environmental conditions to thrive,” Feder said.
Solving a rabbit infestation once it’s started isn’t easy, said Mary Huey, founder of rescue group Rabbit Advocates. Her organization got its start in 2000, when rabbits had overrun a vacant piece of land in Beaverton, Ore. Huey and a team of volunteers spent months catching and rehousing the rabbits.
But finding foster homes for rabbits is difficult, Huey said, and not every shelter or rescue organization in the region will take in stray rabbits.
“I’m sure we could get some people to help catch them, but not without knowing where they’re going to go,” Huey said.
Huey said there’s a reason the phrase is “breed like rabbits.” Every 30 days, adult rabbits will have anywhere from six to 10 babies, the survivors of which grow up to have babies of their own.
Rabbits can and should be spayed and neutered, which helps keep the population in check while curbing some of the behavioral issues male rabbits have, Feder said.
“Without question, letting your unaltered rabbit just loose because you can’t take care of them anymore is not a good thing to do,” Feder said. “They don’t really have the ability to live on their own like that.”
For now, those who live in the Ogden neighborhood have learned to live with their cotton-tailed neighbors. Take Art Noel, for example. His manicured lawn, replete with bushes and flowers, is protected by a wall of chicken wire. The rabbits took interest in some of his shrubbery, he said, prompting him to run the material around the entire perimeter of his front yard.
“Not that I’m a grump,” said Noel, who has lived in the neighborhood since 1974. “But there’s limits.”
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It’s not that he doesn’t like them, Noel clarifies. It’s just that they do make quite a bit of a mess.
“They’re continuous potty machines,” he said.
Mariann Kelly, who has lived with her husband, Jeff, in the neighborhood for 35 years, pointed out three rabbits in her backyard — a sandy-colored baby rabbit sniffing around their backyard play structure, a dark brown one sitting serenely in the dirt and a black one that made a brief appearance before hopping away.
Mariann Kelly, a self-professed animal lover and vegetarian, is angry anyone would think to set these furry critters free. She’s driven to tears thinking about one bunny with an injured leg she affectionately nicknamed “Lefty.” She hasn’t seen Lefty for some time, she said.
“This is a brutal life for them,” she said.
The Kellys’ lawn is covered with its fair share of rabbit poop, and they’ve built a chicken wire fence around a small vegetable patch. Some of the rabbits have burrowed under a backyard shed, especially now that the weather is turning cold.
But Jeff Kelly, who was pulling out Christmas yard decorations, shrugged at their presence.
“It’s a shame they got turned loose,” he said. “But there’s nothing you can do but coexist.”
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