Beloved Rabbits September Update

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In September Beloved Rabbits took in 13 surrendered rabbits, saw 16 adopted to their forever homes and sadly had an additional 43 rehoming requests for a total of 52 rabbits.

Our Management Team have started planning our annual volunteer get together, the Hop Huddle, and we'll share more details of this in due course. We've not been able to do this in person for the past couple of years due to the pandemic so we're all very excited about its return!

We're also delighted to report that Angel's babies (you might remember we nominated her for rescue rabbit of the month) are doing incredibly well in foster and you'd never know they had such a poor start in life. A couple have already been reserved for adoption and we are committed to ensuring they all find loving homes once they're ready to adopt. I've attached a photo below.

In this month's update we wanted to focus on the importance of our foster care network, so Lorna, one of our Foster Care Managers, has put together some information which I've shared below.

As we experience more and more pressure on our surrender service due to the impacts of lockdown pets and cost of living, we’ve worked hard to recruit more foster carers recently, increasing the number of rabbits we can take in to our care. Foster carers are at the heart of our rescue as we don’t have a dedicated rehoming facility.

Each foster carer is homechecked and then provided with equipment to make sure our rabbits are looked after in a space that meets rabbit welfare association and fund standards. We also support each foster carer with training guides and a dedicated Co-Ordinator that helps them to work through the steps of collecting a foster rabbit through to adoption which includes healthcare and socialisation. Our social media team has done a great job in reaching new people through advertising the role and our foster care managers are busy speaking to all the new applicants, helping them to understand more about the role and how it can fit into their lives.

Our foster network stretches from Perth, across the central belt and down to Ayrshire. We use vet practices local to our foster carers for health care and have developed great relationships with vets right across Scotland. Sometimes this also means they learn from the charity, with complex cases being presented or information we can share with them on trends in symptoms for health conditions that they wouldn’t normally see with individual owners who have one or two rabbits.

Without fosterers we couldn’t continue to help the volume of rabbits we do but each new foster carer is a financial investment to provide the right equipment and a time commitment from our existing volunteers to make sure all of our foster carers have the right information to care for rabbits and feel supported. In the last couple of weeks we have updated our training materials to incorporate feedback from fosterers and support them more in the areas they struggle with.