Speaker 1: You're listening to Petlifradio dot com.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Animal Toopia on pet Life Radio. I'm your host,
Robert Semro. Thank you for joining us on today's show.
We visit some furry and fun small creatures who like
to hop to it. We also visit with the unique
and wonderful organization that is helping out homeless people and
their pets. We'll be right back with a visit to
the bunny Burrow with the bunny Bunch after these messages
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Speaker 2: Welcome back to Animaltopia on petline Radio. We thought it
was the perfect time to share information about Bunny from
one of the foremost experts in everything Bunny, Caroline Sharland
from the Bunny Bunch.
Speaker 9: The Bundy Bunch is a nonprofit, all volunteer run organization.
What we do is we rescue rabbits and other small
animals when they're homeless. We rescue them from shelters, people
find them on the street and we take them in,
get them well, spain new to them, and then we
actively look for good homes for them.
Speaker 2: We recently spent some time at this wonderful organization's home
in Montclair, California, and we're thrilled to see the care
and knowledge that they have about the bunnies, chinchillas, and
guinea pigs being embraced and welcomed by the animal loving community.
The founder of the organization is Caroline Sharland, who is
an expert in the bunny world and is often sought
out for her expertise in opinions on all things bunny.
At age six, Caroline knew she wanted to assist animals.
She raised money for the RSPCA in England, where she
is from. She put on concerts in her backyard Old
Baked Goods, did dog walking and carol singing with other
children in the neighborhood to help raise money. When she
moved to America. She volunteered with a variety of cat
rescue groups and helped them with events and fund raising.
The more she became involved, the more motivated she became
to help change things. Then fate stepped in. She began
rescuing rabbits. Shortly after, she came upon a rabbit in
a pet shop. He was sitting in a little wire
cage full of poop with an empty food and water bowl.
The cage was dirty and he had no space to
run around in. Caroline asked someone who worked there to
please give him some food and water. She waited around
for nearly twenty minutes and they did nothing. She went
home and she told her husband about this poor rabbit
that needed a home. They got in their car and
went straight back there to get him. They named him
Benjamin Bunny. Caroline and her husband experienced firsthand why bunnies
can be so special.
Speaker 9: They're a very intelligent animal. A lot of people have
no idea how intelligent they are. They're very endearing. They
definitely know their name. They know a lot more than that.
I mean, they're always happy to see you. They're a
very gentle animal, and they are they're not like people
ask are they like a cat? Are they like a dog?
And you know, they're actually not. They're not like any
of those animals, and so they're just a very gentle
creature that needs a lot of special care.
Speaker 2: Having had cats all her life, Caroline knew nothing about rabbits.
She consulted some books, but there really was an adequate
information available. The books that she read told her to
put a rabbit in a cage or a hutch living outside.
Being in southern California, she just couldn't believe that a
rabbit would live well outside in a hutch, especially when
it got so hot, so she made them a home
in their apartment. To their amazement, Benjamin started using the
cat's litter box. She thought this was amazing. He could
now live loose in their apartment just like their cat.
The cat and the rabbit, after being properly introduced, got
along fine. In fact, the rabbit turned out to be
the boss. Still, having a rabbit run loose in the
apartment had its challenges, like coming home from work one
day to find the phone cords chewed through, the wallpaper
shredded off the bottom of the walls, and the carpet
pulled up. As Caroline shared with us the Wisdom of money.
Proofing your home is something that should be followed.
Speaker 9: Rabbits chew and they will chew anything they can, So
I tell people wherever you know, when you do have
a rabbit, or if you're thinking about getting a rabbit,
you've got to think about what's safe and what's not safe.
They will chew through an electric cord before you can
stop them, so you have to make sure any telephone
cards like cords, you know, cell phone cards are up
totally out of the way or covered. And we have
at our store a cord cover that's split. It has
a citrus scent built in because they don't tend to
like that, and you cover the cord with that. It
won't stop them one hundred percent from chewing it, but
it does do a good job of deterring them. There's
all kinds of tricks you can do. So cords are
very important to get out of the way. If you
leave your TV remote out, your little buttons on, there
will be nibbled off. They'll often chew the baseboards. They
love wood, and there's baseboards all around the house. I'm
sure they think we put it there just for them,
and so a lot of times. What we've done in
our home is we have tacked on untreated wood onto
the baseboard so they can chew it, and so then
when we move we can take that off and we
have our regular baseboards underneath. They will also chew carpet,
which is dangerous if they ingested it. And so there's
a lot of things to think about, and we tell
people they can come in, they can call us where
I'm going to be putting a new section on our
website about houseproofing. They can get in places where people
can't imagine, so it's really important to make sure the
home is safe for the rabbit.
Speaker 2: Back to Caroline's story, well, they sectioned off the kitchen
with a baby gate, and seeing that there was no
wallpaper in there and the floor was wood, they unplugged
the electrical cords that he could reach and made sure
the phone cord was out of sight. They knew they
had to get Benjamin a friend, so they set out
to find one, Knowing that rescuing a rabbit is always
better than buying a rabbit from a pet store. They
began their search and just by chance, shortly thereafter, they
saw a sign that said free rabbit while she was
driving home from work one day, the people said that
they had bought the rabbit for their child, who was
no longer interested in it. They put it in a
box and handed it to Caroline. So she took home
another male rabbit, and they named that rabbit Ramsey Rabbit.
You know, the more rabbit you have, the more you
really need to understand the importance of proper care and
feeding for rabbits.
Speaker 9: Unfortunately, a lot of people think you can just give
a rabbit a big bowl of pellets and some water
and leave it in a cage, and that's actually the
exact opposite. That's a terrible life for a rabbit. So,
first of all, rabbits do have to live in the
house with air conditioning. They can't take the heat. So
rabbits often die in the summertime, especially California, I mean
most of America is hot all summer, and so they
can't call themselves like cats and dogs and people can,
and so they do die from heat strokes. So it's
very important to be able to provide a cool home
for them. Also, they can't live in cages. Cages are
way too small for a rabbit. I tell people, if
you went to go and adopt a cat or a dog.
You wouldn't bring the cattle dog home and put them
in a cage, so why do it to a rabbit.
And so rabbits, they do great living in the home,
have to be rabbit proof. They do great living in
a room. If that's not possible, then they need to
live in an exercise pen, which is a four foot
by four foot puppy pen is what they're also called.
In there, they need a big litter box, and rabbits
need to eat hay continuously twenty four hours a day.
And what you do is you put rabbits safe litter
in the bottom of the litter box pilot full of hay,
and so rabbits can jump in and graze whenever they like. Now,
some people think, oh, that's discussing they're eating where they
go to the bathroom. Well, rabbits actually eat their own poops.
It's sort of like they make their own vitamins. It's
a different type of poop. It's called a siccotrope, and
as soon as they do poop that out, they eat it.
So once you explain and people understand how rabbits work,
then it's not as bad. So then people understand it's
fine that they eat out of where they go to
the bathroom. They graze like horses do. Rabbits can't vomit,
so they need a very high fiber diet. Everything that
goes in has to go all the way through and
out the other end. Unlike cats, you know, they if
they have a hair ball, they'll vomit a hair ball up.
A rabbit can't do that, and they're very clean, so
they ingest a lot of hair by grooming, so hey,
I say, is about eighty percent of their diet, and
they need piles and piles of hay all the time.
Pellets are more like a treat, and the average size
rabbit about a five pound rabbit. We only suggest giving
an eighth to a quarter of a cup of pellets
a day, and that's it. The pellet should be a
plain pellet. You don't want the kind that has things
that look like cereal and nuts in. That's all sugar
and carbohydrates. So they get limited pellets, and then they
get a veggie salad, which we say for the average
rabbit about two cups a day, and that can be
made up of parsley, dandelion, greens, red green leaf, lettuce,
you know, healthy greens. And then of course everybody loves
to give their rabbit treats. And what we suggest is
flowers and herbs are organic and natural for them. They
can have fruit and very small amounts. Fruit is also
high sugar carrots or even high sugar, and everyone thinks
of carrots for rabbits because of bugs, bunny and so
you know, if you do give your rabbits a piece
of carrot, that's fine, but only give an inch just
as a treat. You know, you don't want to give
him a whole carrot. That's too much sugar.
Speaker 2: As the word got out that Caroline had a pair
of rabbits, little by little rabbits that were no longer wanted,
or rabbits that people had found were brought to her,
it wasn't long before she had a house full of rabbits.
Seeing that there were a lot of rescue groups helping
cats and dogs, but not rabbits, she decided to start
a group just focused on helping rabbits. Not only did
she want to find homes for rabbits, but she wanted
to help the rabbits have a better life once they
were in a home. There have been occasions where the
Bunny Bunches had to rescue as many as six hundred
rabbits from one location. It's a tremendous undertaking and requires
not only funding but also volunteers to make it work.
The Bunny Bunch is fortunate to have a stellar group
of volunteers that contribute in a variety of ways. With
more than three hundred rabbits in their care at any
given time, it's essential that the proper grooming is done
for the health and safety of the rabbits.
Speaker 9: That's very important. Rabbits do shed a lot, and rabbits
are very clean, so they continually groom themselves. However, when
they do that, they ingest a lot of hair and
that's the reason for the high fiber to keep the
hair going through. But when they're shedding, it's important that
they are brushed. So when they're shedding, we suggest they're
brushed every day. When they're not shedding, we suggest they're
brushed at least two to three times a week, if
not more so. Keeping all the loose hair off is important.
That helps them not to ingest it. Another thing is
their nails continually grow and so they do need to
be trimmed. The nails need to be trimmed, and they
also have scent glands. Males and females have either side
of the genital area and these need to be cleaned out.
Just what's easy to do when you know how to
do it, and you just use a cuter, a little
bit of water and wipe that out.
Speaker 2: We all hear about spaining and neutering our dogs and cats,
but don't forget that this is a very important thing
to do for rabbits as well, not only to curb
the overpopulation, but also for the health of the rabbits themselves.
Female rabbits have the potential for uterine cancer, which can
be eliminated by spaying your female rabbits. Also, behavior wise,
you'll see a tremendously positive difference in the rabbits after
they've been spade or neutered. They're not hormonal or fixated
with trying to find another rabbit to mate with. They
truly are much better behaved. Caroline also shared a tip
with us about spade and neuter rabbits. They will almost
always use a litter box, so there's one more reason
for you to get your rabbit spade or neutered. The
Bunny Bunch is a phenomenal place that stresses education. They
not only educate those considering adoption, but they also work
with some of the veterinary clinics in teaching schools to
help share their expertise in particular animal knowledge. Still, with
all that education and information, people are still pleasantly surprised
by the joys that can await them once they adopt
a bunny.
Speaker 9: What really surprises people is once the rabbit has had
a chance to settle into the new home, had a
chance to get to know the people that are looking
after them, and realizing that everything is safe. What an
incredible animal they are. It amazes people how they they
come to you for affection and they want to be
part of the family. They don't necessarily want to be
picked up and cuddled, but they love it when you
lay down on the ground with them, When you stroke
their ears, they'll actually come up and groom you. They'll
lick you in return for you grooming them stroking them.
Like I said, they're very endearing. And the nice thing
is a lot of people don't realize that they can
live ten to fourteen years. They have a much longer
lifespan than people realize. In the olden days, you know,
they was thought they lived three to five years, but
they were on a bad diet, weren't spaed on, you
didn't lived outside. Now they're you know, indoors, getting proper vepcare.
I mean, we have bunnies that have even gone through
radiation therapy for cancer, and you know, it's heart medication
and you know, now there's so much more medically known
that when they get older, just like people and other animals,
you know, we can assist them with medical medication and
different things, and so they do have a very long
life and they really really know you very well.
Speaker 2: The Bunny Bunch Boutique was started shortly after the Bunny
Bunch Burrow due to the fact that there were little
or no supplies for rabbits in the pet shops that
were appropriate. Plus it was a great way to raise
money to help rescued rabbits. It's also a great way
for them to give the quality food, treats and toys
that they want to provide for their bunnies, as well
as making it an easy one stop place for other
bunny parents to find those things as well.
Speaker 9: We're very proud of our store. We started it many
many years ago. And the reason we started it because
we couldn't find really anywhere where you could get items
for rabbits that we considered safe for them to chew
or play with or really healthy for them to eat.
So I love gardening, so I started a line of
treats which I actually grow. They're all organic flowers and
herbs that are safer rabbits, and I actually sun dry
them so it gives them extra vitamins, and we package
them here and we actually ship them all over the country,
even all over even other countries. And the nice thing
about these are the rabbits love them and they're healthy,
and so we know that people can give their rabbits
something that's healthy and that they do enjoy. We have
very good quality hay. We have over three hundred rabbits
in our care at all times, and so we have
to make sure we can provide for them things that
they like. So what we do is we shop for
very good quality hay. We sell good quality pellets. We
have a lot of treats, toys choose to entertain the rabbits.
Rabbits teeth grow continually, so they have to be chewing
on things and they get bored. They like a lot
of things to do, so we're always coming up with
new things and adding different things, and you can show
astor or shop online.
Speaker 2: The Bunny Bunch has many different types of bunnies and
as you've heard, is out to help out as many
of them as they can find forever homes. I thought
i'd share this startling fact from our friends at the
Bunny Bunch. Did you know eighty percent of rabbits bought
for Easter will not make it past that first birthday.
It's startling, sad, and disappointing. That is one of the
reasons that our friends from the Bunny Bunch in Montclair,
California really hope to drive home the message that Easter
bunnies are for Easter, but real bunnies should not be.
For more great, comprehensive and expert bunny information, visit our
friends at the Bunny Bunch in person at their Montclair
location or on the web at bunny Bunch dot org.
When we come back, I want to share with you
all the angelic story of a small organization making a
very big difference for homeless people and their pets. We'll
be right back with angel Hands for the homeless after
these messages, sit.
Speaker 3: Stay, We'll be right back after a short pause.
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Speaker 10: Hi everybody, I'm Megan Blake here with my sidekicks, Super Smiley,
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Speaker 4: Good boy, let's talk past.
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Speaker 2: Welcome back to Animaltopia on pet Life Radio. This next
story came to us from the Animal Toopia toll free
share your story hotline at eight y five two sixty
four six two five eight or eight five five. Animal
Topians don't forget you two. Can share your story or
idea by calling us or even emailing us at Robert
at petlifradio dot com. We've all witnessed the sad scene
of a homeless person with their dog. I know I've
often been moved to help out with some money, but
have walked away wondering what more I could have done
for the person and the dog. I've also wondered why
the person still has the dog. That dog is right
there by their side, faithfully being a best friend in
any condition. I recently had the honor of speaking with
a woman who is doing more and has created an
organization that is devoted to helping and caring for the
homeless and their pets. Karen Hams, a founder of Angel
Hands for the Homeless, was herself homeless at one point.
Through a series of circumstances that could occur to anyone,
Karen found herself and her dog living out of her vehicle.
Speaker 6: I ended up homeless at no fault on my own,
with my dog, with my best friend, and it was
just incredible. But that's how I started this organization. I
knew that people needed help out there. I could see
all the homeless people that had pets all it was
just amazing to me, and I knew that something needed
to be done, so I just started. After I found
a place to live, I started working on a nonprofit
organization for the homeless and their pets because I could
see it was a tremendous need and that you can't
pull the homeless person away from the pet, and you
can't pull the pet away from the homeless person. You know,
you just can't do that. It's the dog is such
a companion to the homeless, and they just love their pets,
and the dogs just give them so much love and
comfort in return.
Speaker 2: Because of Karen's unique experience and understanding, she knows that
the bonds between the homeless and their pets are very strong.
As we discussed, it is also an important source of
inspiration and normalcy for the homeless to maintain their relationships
and care for their pets. As any dog owner will
tell you, a dog doesn't care what you have or
who you may be. They only care that you love them.
These bonds are important. As Karen shared.
Speaker 6: With us, that pet is a best friend, is a loyal,
loving companion and is there you know, does not leave
the side of the homeless individual, and like I said,
to reiterate, just gives a lot of comfort. It helps
that homeless person to persevere in their daily walk of
survival in that homeless state. I don't think that they
would really survive as well without that pet. The pet
is very very important and that's why that I make
sure that I have even placed pets for homeless if
they are enabled to take care of them. But I
also find places that may take a pet. You know,
someone that will be able to foster a pet, or
you know, if they don't want to let go of
their pets, which most of them do not. I always
have pet food, collars, leashes, blankets, all the necessities that
you would have for a pet at home, and I
also have resources for those pets for free spay and neuter,
and also additional information for the pets if they need
low income veterinary care. I have just so much, so
much for the pets and the homeless folks.
Speaker 2: As Karen reflected on our situation and learn more about
the resources that were available if only she had known
about them, she knew she needed to act and create
something that every home homeless person could keep and use
with these and that's exactly what she did.
Speaker 6: When I was homeless, there was absolutely nothing out there
for me, and I did not know that there were,
you know, things that were accessible. So what I had
done is I knew that I needed something so for
the homeless to empower them. So I created this book
that has resources in it for shelters, for legal, for medical,
for substance abuse, for children, for families, for veterans, for everybody.
I mean, this book is so amazing and one resource,
you can contact one resource and get numerous resources from
that one contact number. And like I say, also the
same applies for the resources for the pets. I knew
how critical it was to have something like that out there,
because that's right the homeless do not have telephones, televisions,
computer Most of them do not, so I had to
have something that would be accessible and something that would
empower them so they could just you know, go to
the address or get a contact number and call it.
Speaker 2: Karen's organization is small, but its impact is large. Like
any organization, Angel Hands for the Homeless struggles with the
daily challenges of providing care packages, resource guides, gathering supplies,
distributing them, applying for scarce grants, and right on down
to the concerns about whether her older vehicle will hold
up or not so that she can bring the packages
and information to the people who obviously cannot travel to
her for help. She hopes that her organization can serve
as a model for others to help with the tragic
situation that far too many people in their pets find
themselves struggling through these days. Karen and Angel Hands for
the Homeless is an animotopian hero for bringing care and
solace to those who many ignore or think differently of
her efforts to make something positive out of a negative
situation that she and her dog went through are truly remarkable.
For more information about Angel Hands for the Homeless, or
to help them in their efforts. Visit them online at
angel Hands LA dot blogspot dot com. Again, that's Angel
Hands h A n z LA dot blogspot dot com.
As we close this episode, I'm reminded how everyone can
make a difference in the world for someone. I want
to thank those who are doing just that and encourage
those who haven't done so yet to do so. Every
little thing counts so much more these days. I want
to say thank you again to Caroline Sharland from The
Bunny Bunch and Karen Hamza from Angel Hands for the
Homeless for all that they and their organizations are doing.
Don't forget. If you have a great animal story you'd
like to share with us, whether it's funny, quirky, or heartfelt,
or just an idea for a story, please contact us
on our toll free share your Animal Toopian Story hotline
at eight fy five two six four six two five
eight or eight five five Animal Topians for Animal Topia,
pet Life Radio and all of those who make this
show possible. I'm your host, Robert Simro, saying I'm proud
to be an animal topian and I look forward to
sharing more stories with all of you soon.
Speaker 3: Let's talk pets every week on demand only on petlifradio
dot com.