Paula, thanks for posting about PAWS and Wendy! The situation at the shelter is not a good one for anyone, and until quite recently, the rabbits haven't had any advocates at all.
The shelter takes in nearly 30,000 animals a year and is very poorly funded by the city. The animal-care staff are city union employees who do not necessarily want to work with animals or care about the welfare of the animals in their charge.
The rabbit room at the shelter is 12 x 16 and houses up to 25 rabbits, plus guinea pigs, hamsters, and the occasional bird or reptile. We are very lucky in that a local guinea pig rescue saves virtually all of the pigs who come in, and reptiles, ferrets, and birds are also quickly moved into rescue.
So, that leaves the buns.
While other shelters may have goals of keeping their rabbits supplied with toys, grass mats, or fresh veggies, at our shelter our rabbits are doing well if they get pellets and water every day. Their hay is atrocious, and they usually don't get any, anyway.
The room they are in opens up into the kennels, so they are hearing 120 dogs bark virtually all day every day. Shelter staff have little enough time for the basics like cage cleaning, so "extras" like getting out of their cages for exercise are out of the question unless volunteers do it. And, while rabbits used to be spayed and neutered at the shelter, for several months no surgeries have been done at all. Let's not talk about healthy animals being put down, either.
So yes, we volunteers have our work cut out for us in Philadelphia!
I recently visited the SEPA-Delaware branch of the House Rabbit Society's shelter in Delaware, and I learned a lot about how to improve the housing of our rabbits. Thanks to Joyce!
We are actively recruiting more volunteers, so we can have more rabbits getting more exercise more often. We are also recruiting foster homes, and advertising our bunnies everywhere we can think of. This has led to a local rescue contacting us about some of our most desperate bunnies. Thank you Paula!
Hopefully, what we are doing will pay off and the shelter will have fewer rabbits who are there for 10 or 11 months, unadopted. I am hoping we can add mobile adoption events for rabbits, both to create adoptions and to let the public know about the problem of abandoned rabbits in our area.
I look forward to learning more here at RO.
If you live near Philadelphia and would like to help in any way, pm me!
