Local rabbit rescue groups are intensifying their efforts to help spay and neuter the animals after the Los Angeles City Council excluded rabbits from an increase in vouchers for the critical surgeries.    

The council voted on July 30 to increase voucher rates to $120 for cats and $195 for dogs, but left the voucher amount for rabbits at $125, despite a recommendation by the council’s Budget and Finance Committee to increase that amount.

“Despite all our efforts and what should have been a done deal … Los Angeles City Council members backtracked to an earlier, watered-down recommendation that left out rabbits, the Citywide Cat Program, and other essential programs,” Michelle Kelly, president of the Los Angeles Rabbit Foundation, said Monday.

“To understand the consequences of this, know that the city’s contract with veterinary providers requires that they not accept any funds from other sources to help cover the actual cost of the operation (which as you may have guessed by now, is greater than $125 for a rabbit),” she continued. “As of right now, no clinic is accepting the $125 rabbit s/n voucher for members of the public. You can get a voucher from the city, but you can’t use it anywhere.”

Kelly told City News Service on Tuesday that “the path to this disastrous council vote began with the Chief Accounting Office’s recommendations, which considered only cost containment rather than a cost-benefit analysis that would clearly point to a greater need for investment in animal spay neuter in general and rabbits in particular, given their reproductive rate.”

Councilwoman Eunisses Hernandez, who introduced the original motion, said the vote was an important step toward providing affordable pet care.    

“We know that when pet care becomes unaffordable, it’s working-class families and animals who suffer,” she said in a statement after the July 30 meeting. “This voucher program is a step toward making sure every pet — and every person who loves them — has access to basic care. There’s still more work to do to expand access, but this is a major win for our communities and our animals.”

But critics say excluding rabbits was a huge mistake, given the species’ prodigious reproduction rate and the fact that such surgeries for rabbits are typically more expensive than for dogs and cats, often exceeding $500.

As a result, they say, many low-income residents will either dump their pet rabbits, worsening an already daunting overcrowding crisis at the city’s six shelters, or simply not get them altered, leading to many more litters of unwanted bunnies.

Lejla Hadzimuratovic, founder of Bunny World Foundation, Los Angeles’ most active rabbit rescue group, said that by excluding rabbits, the council “signed a death sentence for countless animals. It’s cruel, it’s shortsighted, and it’s unacceptable,” she told CNS.

“As an organization that has saved over 20,000 rabbits, we know firsthand the suffering caused by this neglect. No reputable veterinarian can spay or neuter a rabbit for $125 when the real cost is often ten times that amount.”

Hadzimuratovic said BWF rescues rabbits from Los Angeles Animal Services as well as other shelters and situations throughout the region.    

“As a nonprofit, we depend on these vouchers — and the veterinarians who honor them — to help offset the enormous cost of surgeries. Our vets apply the voucher value toward the bill, which still leaves us covering the majority of the cost, but every extra dollar allows us to save more lives. Had rabbits been included in this increase, we could have stretched our resources further and rescued even more bunnies in desperate need,” she added.

Animal advocate were also disappointed that the council vote excluded mobile clinics, onsite providers and the Citywide Cat Program.    

“Today was a bit of a blindside, to be honest,” Jana Brennan, program manager for Michelson Center for Public Policy’s Spay and Neuter Initiative, told the Los Angeles Daily News on July 30. “Including those (coverage areas) is incredibly important for the long-term investment in spay and neuter in Los Angeles. So we were very disappointed to learn that had shifted back to that previous recommendation.”

Kelly’s organization plans to set up a small spay/neuter voucher program to help people who find stray rabbits, so they don’t have to turn them into shelters to get them neutered. The program would not cover the full cost, but would help offset it, and could be combined with other vouchers for approved clinics.

Kelly also said that at some point, LA Rabbit Foundation plans to ask for the following legislative changes at the city level:    

  • Mandatory spay/neuter of rabbits, just like LA has had for dogs and cats since 2008;
  • A number limit on rabbits. “Nobody needs 300 rabbits in their back yard,” she said;
  • House rabbits must be made explicitly legal in LA. “They currently are not, unless you are a resident in public housing,” she said;
  • Some minimal care standards for rabbits should be baked into LA’s Municipal Code;

Kelly added that her group would ask the council to revisit the voucher increases “as soon as the political landscape changes.”