Volunteers ensure Kyalami bunnies are sterilised
KYALAMI – Five months and 80 bunnies later, the newly sterilised hoppers are back on the Kyalami property.
Eighty bunnies were caught and sterilised thanks to the efforts of NGO Berario Bunnies.
The organisation has helped sterilise the bunnies over the last five months, with the latest batch caught on 19 January.
Since June last year, a Kyalami property owned by Sam Moss gained a steady flow of bunnies when she would feed the ducks and geese on the property. That was when she realised there were too many bunnies on her property eating the food.
“It was before the wintertime last year when a few wild bunnies would come for the food. Because there is food and shelter for them, they just stayed over the time, but they started having babies at an alarming rate,” Moss recalled.
Berario Bunnies started catching the bunnies on Moss’s property in September 2019. As there were so many bunnies they needed to capture, the process has only recently ended.
According to the founder of Berario Bunnies, Meahni Pieterse, bunnies have babies every 28 days and can range from four to 12 babies.
She explained, “We sterilise the bunnies to stop them from breeding because too many bunnies can be a problem considering they can be killed easily.
“Because rabbits are an exotic species and not wild animals, they should not be living wild. They are domesticated animals or pets, and living in the wild is a very hard life for them.”
Pieterse added, “There were 80 bunnies caught in total but there could be more.”
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Once the bunnies were caught, they were taken to be sterilised. Often, Berario Bunnies covers the cost of the sterilisation of the bunnies, however, there are times where a non-profit organisation will pay for the surgeries. In this case, Moss covered the costs of the bunnies’ sterilisation.
Following the sterilisation, the bunnies recovered for a few days with Berario Bunnies and then returned to Moss on her property.
Moss said that when she goes to feed the ducks, between four and 30 bunnies appear. “I have a lot of animals here be it dogs, cats, horses and so on. Having the bunnies here is not a big deal since they are feral and not bothersome. It just becomes a problem when they have more and more babies,” Moss concluded.
