Northwood Animal Hospital Veterinarian Gayle Roberts gets ready to spay Wooley in Irvine on Sunday, March 10, 2024. This rabbit was surrendered by its owner and is being looked after by Bunny World Foundation in L.A. Roberts says 40 percent of her clientele are owners of rabbits. (Photo by Mindy Schauer, Orange County Register/SCNG)

It’s almost Easter. Please don’t impulse-buy a bunny! They multiply like, well, rabbits.

“People get them thinking they’re an easy pet, but it can be involved and expensive to feed them, so people dump them at shelters,” said veterinarian Gayle Roberts of Northwood Animal Hospital in Irvine, the go-to vet for rescue groups seeking to spay and neuter rescue bunnies.

“A lot of people don’t realize how specialized their care and feeding is.”

Nevertheless, ads for adorable baby bunnies are abundant on social media and in online classified ads in various languages this time of year. Folks buy these fluff-balls to surprise the kids on Easter morning, and then … the fluff-balls grow up. They need spaying, neutering, specialized diets, regular medical care.

In January of last year, Los Angeles’ city shelter — one of the few that clearly breaks out rabbit intakes in its public reporting — took in 41 rabbits. In June, it took in 72.

Animal shelters in Southern California handle thousands of rabbits each year, often busiest in the months after Easter. In Los Angeles alone, city shelters took in 732 bunnies in the last year, down from 1,088 the year before, according to city statistics. Some bunnies are yanked from the jaws of death — i.e., the euthanasia track — by the surprising number of rabbit rescue groups in Southern California, taken to Roberts for fixing, then ferried to adoption events all over the region.

Earlier this month, Roberts did surgery on more than a dozen of the 100 rabbits rescued from a home in Granada Hills and taken in by the Bunny World Foundation. One of them was Cupcake, a badly matted bun who required more than an hour of careful shaving.

Rabbit spays and neuters take some 13 to 20 minutes per bunny, depending on their size and the ease of finding the pertinent parts. Roberts does scores of such operations every month.

“I am a bunny lover,” said Roberts.

Guests drive through Lion Country Safari in Irvine in 1971. (Photo courtesy Orange County Archives’ Planning Dept. Collection)

Well, yes, that, too. Roberts was a vet assistant, then vet, for exotics at Lion Country Safari in Irvine back in the 1970s and ’80s. There were lions and elephants and giraffe and rhino, and that antelope with the infected joint. …

Later, she worked with maimed pelicans after depraved assailants cut off their beaks in Dana Point. The survivors had to be hand-fed and kept from flying away, which would have meant certain starvation and death. She worked on beak prostheses for them and has amassed a collection of pelican statuettes and stuffed animals over the years to commemorate that work, as well as several awards.

After buying Northwood Animal Hospital in 1986, Roberts found herself hopping down the bunny trail. About 40% of the patients are rabbits, and some days, rabbits are the only patients she sees.

Loving a bunny

Why are bunnies so much more prolific than dogs and cats? Because female bunnies pump out estrogen almost non-stop, so they’re almost always fertile. A single female can have four litters a year — with up to 12 babies in each litter.

The math is terrifying. Then they end up at shelters.

Pet rabbits should be spayed or neutered, vaccinated, kept in clean and safe enclosures, fed healthy food.

That means hay and greens rather than just bagged pellets. If they eat only pellets, their ever-growing molars aren’t ground down and that can cause problems.

They must be regularly brushed because too much self-grooming means too much hair in their bellies which can mean digestive problems.

At least 100 rabbits found at a Granada Hills property on Feb. 20, 2024, are now up for adoption and fostering under the auspices of the Bunny World Foundation and Los Angeles Animal Services. The property owner called for help when the fast-breeding bunnies started to get out of hand. (Image courtesy of the Bunny World Foundation)

And all that estrogen leads to high levels of uterine cancer in unfixed animals, so spaying and neutering is important. It’s also important to fix them if you have more than one rabbit; in pens, as pets, it avoids conflict.

Here’s more of what prospective bunny parents need to know, as per Roberts:

• Rabbits are a prey species so their fright-and-flight response is strong. They’re pessimists. They wake up every day and think, “I’m going to die today.”

• Stress can give them heart attacks.

• Their spines are fragile so falls and leaps from on high should be avoided.

• They have sharp nails that, if left untrimmed, can wound eager toddlers trying to cuddle their cuteness.

• They do well in pairs. When one dies, the survivor should be allowed to say goodbye.

• Some people are very allergic.

• Though they’re quiet pets — “They don’t bark while you’re trying to talk on the phone” — they can emit a “super high-pitched scream” when fighting.

• They eat their own poop to extract all the nutrition possible.

• Their skin is prone to tearing.

• They’re prone to eye and ear infections.

• They were used to test for pregnancy until the early 1960s.

Rabbits are not as popular as dogs and cats — while 45% of households have dogs (62 million), and 26% have cats (37 million), only 1.2% have rabbits (2.2 million), according to the American Veterinary Medical Association. But if they’re well cared for, bunnies can live for 15 or 16 years and be quiet, soft, soothing, lovely companions.

If you’re not all-in on bunny care, Roberts has a suggestion: “Get a chocolate one instead.”