1,700 bounding bunnies rescued from a Reno woman whose obsession with her pets

WASHOE COUNTY, Nev. — There are bunnies in the bedrooms and hares in the hallway. Bucks burrowing and does dozing. Cages and cages of cottontails nibbling their rabbit chow in clean, controlled contentment.

And that's just inside this house rented by the Best Friends Animal Society. Outside, more than 100 newly built rabbit runs house close to 1,700 bounding bunnies rescued from a Reno woman whose obsession with her pets led to hoarding and eventually to a call for help.

GALLERY: See photos of the Great Bunny Rescue

That plea led to what the society is calling The Great Bunny Rescue of 2006, an ambitious, nationwide campaign to find good homes for these rabbits.

The society operates the nation's largest animal sanctuary in Kanab, Utah. It has a track record of tackling complex animal rescue operations, including a major effort after Hurricane Katrina.

The rescuers needed every bit of their expertise when they arrived at Jackie Decker's house in January. Though overall the rabbits were in surprisingly good health, their situation was appalling, says Richard Crook, Best Friends' rapid-response manager.

"The stench. The feces. The dead bunnies. It was just terrible. You just can't imagine thinking that any part of that was OK," he says.

Decker, who already had had a run-in with Reno animal control officers in 2002 when she had 500 rabbits, was unable to acknowledge the problem, Crook says. "To talk to her, all the bunnies were being taken care of. The bunnies were fine."

Repeated calls to Decker's home were not returned.

Decker had first contacted Best Friends in September 2005, says its Bunny House manager, Debby Widolf. "At the time, I did not understand how many rabbits she had," so she gave Decker the names of nearby rescue groups to contact. "We had no room for additional rabbits," Widolf says.

Five months later, in January, Best Friends got a call from another Nevada animal group telling the organization that Decker's situation had gotten out of hand. Widolf contacted Decker on Jan. 25, "and she told me she had 800 to 1,000 rabbits in her backyard."

A week later, Widolf flew to Reno and spent two days at Decker's house. She immediately called for reinforcements from the society's Utah headquarters. "We set up a makeshift clinic in February on Jackie's property to begin treating ill rabbits."

But it quickly became clear that more than just treatment was called for. The rabbits needed new homes.

Best Friends drew up a contract to take legal possession of the rabbits — and realized there were a lot more than the 800 they were expecting. "There were actually 1,600 to 1,700 of them," Crook says.

The rapid response

That same month, a Best Friends rapid-response team arrived in town, rented a ranch with a two-bedroom house just outside of town and set to work. In May, the team began transferring the rabbits from Decker's home to the ranch by the vanload.

It's an operation run with almost military precision. And no wonder. Crook is a 22-year veteran firefighter. Adoption coordinator Paulina Russell is a former Marine and longtime Forest Service ranger.

Wrangling rabbits is no visit with the Easter bunny. People would go into the yard using small-gauge fencing to herd a group together and just start grabbing. Rabbits' hind legs can be vicious. "There's a lot of people who have scarred-up arms from it," Crook says.

And all the while, the bunnies did what bunnies do. While illness was taking some of them, babies were arriving each day. Sometimes a van would leave Decker's house with 150 rabbits and arrive half an hour later at the ranch with a dozen more, Crook says.

A group of volunteer veterinarians and vet techs set out to block all that breeding as well as put a microchip under the skin at the back of the neck of every rabbit so they can be easily tracked. Volunteers built two rooms onto the back of the ranch house for surgery and a third for post-operative recovery.

"It was like a MASH unit," says Michelle Williams, the project's veterinarian. "We had volunteer vets spaying and neutering 30 rabbits a day here, but 50 a day were being born."

During the height of the transfer and fixing operation, there were upward of 25 volunteers working in Reno, with an additional 15 at the society's headquarters in Utah working on logistics and adoptions.

It wasn't until the end of May that they finally turned the rising tide of bunnies. As summer set in, volunteers built pens and rabbit runs and hooked up a misting system to keep the cottontails cool in the 90-degree heat. The focus turned to socializing the bunnies and finding them homes.

Volunteers spend hours each day visiting the animals, cleaning their cages and getting them used to being around people. Karen Swope, a retired music teacher, comes out every Thursday with big garbage bags of lettuce-ends that she gets from a restaurant near her home and feeds the bunnies.

Russell arrived as a volunteer and was hired to coordinate adoptions. Though many large animal sanctuaries are signing on to take bunnies by the bunch, individual homes also are needed. "We've pretty much saturated the Reno area," she says, so volunteers are looking farther afield.

In June they launched the Rabbit Ranger program, which asks "responsible and reliable" organizations or people around the country to take 10 or more rabbits, either permanently or temporarily, while adoptive homes are found.

The efforts have been successful. As of Monday, all but 250 of the bunnies were spoken for.

Russell is experimenting with caging and shipping methods in Reno while Crook travels the country doing on-site assessments to make sure the people getting the rabbits are up to the task. Some will travel in air-conditioned trucks fitted with padded shelves to hold cages. A Best Friends board member who is a private pilot will fly others. "She can take up to seven crates with two rabbits each, but if it's a short hop we can put three in a cage," Russell says.

Crook is the first to acknowledge that all this is taking "an amazing amount of money." He won't give an exact figure, but when the figure $1 million is spoken, he smiles and nods. "It's an amazing amount of money," he says.
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Some people are really worried about saving critters from SOMETHING ?

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