Blog Entry 13-Easter Crazies and the Abandonment of Bunnies

When I refer to Easter Crazies, I am referring to a certain breed of impulse buyer.  Around Easter every year, we see a sudden influx of interest in rabbit adoption. Unfortunately, the majority of the people coming in haven’t done any research on rabbits and are there simply because they want to get their kids an Easter Bunny.  The promotion of Easter makes rabbits look adorable, cute, and hardly any effort to take care of. While the first two descriptions may be true (how can anyone resist those twitchy noses and fluffy fur?), a rabbit is certainly not an “easy pet.” The Easter Crazies who do succeed in getting a rabbit eventually find this out.  By the time summer rolls around, the shelter becomes overrun with owner turn in rabbits.  The rabbit has grown up and owners don’t think their rabbit is so cute anymore and return or give them to the shelter.  The shelter does have a policy that no one can adopt a rabbit on the day of Easter.  Just like on the day of Halloween, no one is allowed to adopt black cats, for similar reasons, as the rabbits rise in impulse buys during Easter.  So Easter has its pros and cons due to this spiraling of media attention and really shows the power of suggestion and of popular culture.
Yet this is also why people chose to domesticate certain animals in the first place.  Either for the purpose of aiding man or for the purpose of being cute and cuddly man’s best friend.  It’s why rabbits became as popular as pets and were domesticated.  Maybe not necessarily due to Easter but the domestication was probably strongly influenced by the rabbit being the cultural icon of Easter.  It’s another example of the problematic human-animal relationship but in a different way.