HOUSE RABBIT SOCIETY

House Rabbit Society's goal is to improve the lives of domestic rabbits by elevating their living standards, quality of care, and legal status as indoor animal companions through education, rescue, and awareness.

For our goal of rescuing abandoned rabbits and finding permanent homes for them, we strive to increase our adoption rate and reduce our length of stay for rabbits at House Rabbit Society. We recruit foster homes to allow us to increase our capacity to care for additional rabbits and find them homes without the need to take in additional rabbits at our headquarters facility. We promote the rabbits for adoption, and take them to off-site adoption events.

In 2019, we hired a part-time vet and RVT, and built an on-site surgery suite to facilitate fast spay/neuter and fast surgical and medical care for House Rabbit Society's rabbits, allowing us to help the medically neediest rabbits receive the highest level of care, and to help rabbits to be ready for adoption as quickly as possible. Our surgery suite is the first rabbit-specific surgery suite at a shelter in the world. While this was paused in late 2021 after the tragic death of our vet, we are actively working to reopen our surgery suite by the summer of 2022.

For our goal of educating the public and assisting humane societies, twice a year we publish The House Rabbit Journal, which is mailed to all of our members. We also operate rabbit.org, which provides rabbit care and health information to an average of 3,000 unique users a day. Our staffed headquarters is available for the public to call and ask questions, and we have a calling list on rabbit.org of local House Rabbit Society licensed educators across the country (and internationally!) that the public can call. We offer classes to local animal shelters. We present educational presentations at rabbit events and table at veterinary and sheltering conferences to connect professionals interested in helping rabbits with our educational resources.

We have 28 licensed House Rabbit Society chapters in 19 states as well as three international locations that each have their own own local rescue, adoption, and education programs . We have over 300 licensed educators that work with shelters, rabbit caregivers, and the general public to share our huge repository of quality house rabbit education materials through print, web, social media, webinar, and most importantly in-person hands on events.

We have a talented team of volunteers and staff - we have capabilities that include graphic design, education, pedagogy, photography, writing, publishing, rabbit care, exotic veterinary care, animal chiropractic and acupuncture, grant writing and fundraising, animal sheltering, retail management, and social media communications.

We have over 300 licensed educators that work with shelters, rabbit caregivers, and the general public to share our huge repository of quality house rabbit education materials through print, web, social media, webinar, and most importantly in-person hands on events. We have 28 licensed House Rabbit Society chapters in 19 states as well as three international locations that each have their own own local rescue, adoption, and education programs.

House Rabbit Society, together with all of our 35 chapters, has rescued over 40,000 rabbits since our founding in 1988.

HRS Headquarters rabbit adoption numbers:
2015 129
2016 141
2017 120
2018 168
2019 167

We focus our efforts on shelter rabbits that, but for House Rabbit Society, wouldn't have a second chance. Many medically needy rabbits have longer lengths of stay, but we are very successful in getting these rabbits healthy and finding loving adoptive homes for them.

We opened a low-cost spay/neuter clinic out of our headquarters in Richmond, CA in 2014, and have spayed/neutered over 650 rabbits, preventing accidental litters and helping to keep rabbits in their homes. We were able to train 5 veterinarians new to rabbits in rabbit spay/neuter through our clinic.

In 2019, we opened an on-site surgery suite and hired a part-time vet and RVT, so we can perform needed rabbit surgeries every week.

We have operated rabbit.org since 1995, which provides rabbit care and health information to an average of 4,000 unique users a day as of March, 2022.

We have over 300 licensed educators that work with shelters, rabbit caregivers, and the general public to educate and rase awareness of house rabbits and the importance of spay neuter. We have over 70,000 users of our Facebook rabbit chat group.

In January of 2022 we have begun to design and implement a 3 year strategic plan. Those strategies and goals will be shared here, on our website, and in our other communication channels when it is complete in late June 2022.