For months I have walked by a house in my neighborhood where two bunnies, one brown and one white, frolicked on the lawn.
Lawn bunnies.
I assumed they were somebody’s pets — that the homeowners had domesticated their bunnies so well that they let them roam freely in their front yard.
Free-range bunnies.
Until tonight.
Tonight a highschooler from South Salem stopped on our front doorstep, rang the door, and stood there, holding a small, quivering white bunny with red eyes.
She had been knocking on doors up and down the street and happened to land with us. Good thing, too, because we are, I assure you, the nicest people on the block.
We’re calling him Buster.
Bartholomew was another contender.
Anyway, after knocking on quite a few doors ourselves, we learned that there is actually a mythical race of free-range bunnies roaming around our neighborhood. No one is claiming them as pets, and all of the homeowners we talked to insisted that the bunnies are, in fact, wild.
Dear Readers, if you saw this little quivering bunny on D Street, you’d know it wasn’t wild. Someone come pick up your pet at the Willamette Humane Society, because that’s where this buster is going tomorrow.
Come on folks, let’s not lose another bunny to the mean streets of Salem.
What a hare-raising experience!
Hi,
1. Look on craigslist. Place ad on craigslist with photo.
2. Place ad with Willamette Humane Society with photo.
3. Place found ad with the Statesman Journal (FREE) (yes I know you work for the other paper in town).
Please be patient. I found a dog over the 4th of July weekend. I did all of the above. Plus i checked the dog for a microchip (or my vet did). It took the owner a full week to claim their dog. I did not want to take the dog to the Marion County Dog Shelter and hope the owner would show up. It was a little bit of a hassle caring for the dog, but the owner was really happy to have their dog get home.
Those are great ideas — I’ll pass them along to the very sweet high-schooler who stopped by with the bunny. At this point, I’m just the messenger. She took him with her when she left.
I’m all about getting peoples’ stuff back to them. I’m done with license plates, but I still do bunnies.
The bunny may not be wild but dont let them all fool you i ended up adopting a pair of actual wild rabbits some one had mistaken for infant domesticated bunnies. if they are grey or sandy brown with white ring markings around their eyes they are in fact wild… can be domesticated but should be left wild >> i love my two and wouldnt give them up for the world but always make sure to check befor takign them in.
There are a LOT of feral rabbits in Salem. I keep rabbits as pets (in hutches, where they are safe from dogs, etc) and in the last year I have adopted two feral rabbits from my neighborhood. One used to be a breeding rabbit, is a purebred Californian and was loose in my ‘hood for over a year before I finally caught her while she was eating my overwintering cabbages. There are dozens of feral rabbits at Woodmansee park, and people put out feed for them. I wish people would keep their rabbits enclosed. They are escape artists, and they breed…well, you know.
Since this was well past Halloween, no chance that this was Bunnicula, the famous vampire bunny?
Actually, someone accused me of finding Bunnicula on Twitter yesterday…
I have seen many of the rabbits at Woodmansee Park. It would not surprise me up around D street if those animals were let lose after a foreclosure. There have been a few in the Englewood area and it is not uncommon for people to leave pets behind since they can’t take them with them.
defeniately bookmarked
[...] might remember I spoke of the “free-range bunnies” in my neighborhood on this blog a few weeks before [...]