found a stray rabbit? here's what to do before you wrangle
This article expands on our original thoughts on rescue from 2022. A lot has changed since then, including us.
Every week, someone finds a rabbit dumped in a park, a parking lot, or a residential street in Los Angeles, Long Beach, Orange County and beyond. The posts flood social media within hours - photos, panicked captions, dozens of comments saying "I want to help!" Then, more often than not, the rabbit ends up in a shelter anyway (which is what the shelter is there for) or nothing at all.
We don't say this to discourage you. We say it because we've wrangled these rabbits. We've received these calls and text messages at 2 AM. We run Second Hop specifically because of what happens when good intentions don't have a plan behind them.
If you love rabbits and want to help when you find one in crisis, this article is for you. The rabbit needs you to read it before you act.
The wrangle is the easy part.
Catching a dumped rabbit feels urgent and heroic - and it is. But the moment that rabbit is in your hands, the real work begins. Where do they go tonight? Who's paying for the vet visit they almost certainly need? What happens if they’re sick? What if they’re pregnant? What if you're allergic, your landlord doesn't allow pets, or your dog is too interested?
A wrangle without a plan is just transferring the rabbit from one precarious situation to another.
Understand what you're getting into before you pick up the rabbit.
Dumped rabbits are almost always in some degree of distress. They've been exposed to weather, predators, dehydration, and trauma. Many have been living outside for days or weeks before someone notices them.
Common issues you may encounter:
GI stasis from stress and inadequate food
Respiratory infections from exposure
Flystrike (in warm months): maggot infestation that is life-threatening and requires emergency vet care
Pregnancy or recent birth (female rabbits can conceive almost immediately after giving birth)
Injuries from predator attacks or cars
Severe matting, overgrown nails, and dental issues from neglect
Before you wrangle, ask yourself honestly: can you handle any of these scenarios financially and logistically? If the answer is no, that's not a reason to walk away - but it is a reason to have a plan before the rabbit is in your car.
Call before you pull.
Rescues are almost always full. This is not a failure of the rescue community - it's a direct consequence of the overpopulation crisis driven by rabbits who weren't spayed or neutered, impulse purchases, and owners who didn't research before adopting. By the time a dumped rabbit needs a placement, every foster home may already be stretched thin.
Cold-calling a rescue with a rabbit already in your arms puts them in an impossible position. It's not fair to them, and it's not fair to the rabbit whose outcome now depends on a snap decision made under pressure.
What to do instead:
Reach out before you wrangle. If the rabbit is safe enough, that should give you a few hours to send a quick message to a rescue explaining the situation - location, condition, your capacity to hold temporarily. This gives them time to actually help you.
Offer to foster. This is the single most important thing you can do. Most rescues will pull a rabbit they otherwise couldn't place if the person who found them is willing to foster. You become part of the solution rather than adding to the load. Fostering doesn't mean adopting - it means providing a safe temporary home while the rescue handles vetting, medical care, and finding a permanent family.
Know your local shelters. LAAS (Los Angeles Animal Services) and LBACS (Long Beach Animal Care Services) are legal surrender options. Shelters are overwhelmed, also a direct result of overpopulation and bad decision-making upstream, but they are a legitimate resource. A rabbit surrendered to a shelter has a documented record and a chance at rescue pulls. A rabbit passed from stranger to stranger informally has neither.
What "I want to help" actually looks like.
When a rabbit rescue post goes viral in your community, you'll see hundreds of comments. Most of them mean well and do nothing. Here's what genuinely helps:
Offer a foster placement: even one night, even one week, buys the rescue time to find a real solution
Offer to cover a vet visit: even a basic exam ($75–150) can be the difference between knowing what you're dealing with and guessing
Offer transport: rescues and shelters often can't pick up; being able to move the rabbit from point A to point B is genuinely useful
Share the post to targeted communities: use rabbit-specific Facebook groups, subreddits like r/Rabbits, local community boards - not just your general feed where the reach is broad but the audience isn't
Don't offer to "take them" if you haven't thought past tonight: a well-meaning offer that falls through 48 hours later is harder on the rabbit than no offer at all
The shelters are full because of decisions made years ago.
We want to be direct about something: the rabbit overpopulation crisis in Los Angeles and Long Beach is not a mystery. It is the predictable result of rabbits being sold in pet stores and Easter markets without education, adopted on impulse, and not spayed or neutered. A single unspayed female rabbit can produce up to 12 kits every 30 days, year-round, indoors.
Every rabbit at LAAS and LBACS right now represents a chain of decisions - none of which involved the rabbit. The rescues are full because the shelters are full. The shelters are full because the surrender rate outpaces the adoption rate. The surrender rate is high because people didn't prepare before they got a rabbit, and they're not preparing before they wrangle one either.
You cannot solve this with good intentions alone. You can be part of solving it by being prepared, being honest about your capacity, and making sure the next person who gets a rabbit from you (or because of you) is set up to succeed.
Last year, BCB fostered 16 rabbits from a single hoarding situation - all of them the downstream consequence of unchecked breeding. This year alone, we wrangled two dumped rabbits who gave birth at the shelter before we could even get them stable. In the last four weeks alone, we relinquished 10+ dumped rabbits to Long Beach Animal Care Services - all wrangled from El Dorado Regional Park, a single location in Long Beach. These aren't abstract statistics. This is what uncontrolled rabbit reproduction looks like in real life, and it happens constantly in Los Angeles, Long Beach and Orange County.
What BCB does - and what we cannot do.
Bun Chia Burrow is not a rescue. We currently do not have 501c3 status. We are a for-profit boarding, bonding, and grooming hotel that runs Second Hop as a good samaritan rescue fund on the side. Second Hop exists specifically to pull red-listed rabbits from LAAS and LBACS - rabbits who are days or hours from euthanasia - and fund their medical care and rehoming.
We do this because we've seen what happens when no one does. But we are one small team with limited capacity, and we cannot be the safety net for every rabbit that gets dumped in Southern California.
What we can do:
Help you think through your options if you've found a rabbit and don't know what to do - email us at info@bunchiaburrow.com
Point you toward our LA + OC Exotic Vet Directory if the rabbit needs medical attention
Connect you with our Rabbit Adoptions Page for our vetted rescue contacts in LA and Orange County
Sponsor Second Hop if you want to support the work we're already doing
Before the next rabbit shows up in your neighborhood, have a plan.
Find your nearest exotic vet. Know whether your living situation allows a temporary foster. Identify one or two rescues in your area and follow them so you know their capacity before you need it. Save the LAAS and LBACS intake numbers in your phone.
The rabbit doesn't have time for you to figure this out after you've picked them up. But if you figure it out now, you'll actually be ready when it matters.
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