ORLANDO, Fla. – A bill to curb sales of pet rabbits is expected to return to the Florida Legislature next session, the bill’s sponsor confirmed to News 6 Wednesday.
Amid a rash of rabbit colonies popping up in neighborhoods all over Florida in the last few years, State Rep. Katherine Waldron, D-Palm Beach, sponsored HB 701 back in January. The bill sought to rein in pet rabbit sales in several ways:
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- Banning sales of rabbits at pet stores during March and April, around the Easter holiday
- Banning sales at flea markets and along the side of the road
- Requiring better monitoring of rabbits at pet stores
- Requiring microchipping so that pet rabbits found in the wild can be returned to the owner or store
“The bill doesn’t prevent anybody from owning rabbits,” Waldron told News 6 back in January. “It just makes it a little more careful process, a more thoughtful process, and I think the more people who are educated about what goes into taking care of a rabbit, the better we will be.”
The bill had the support of rabbit rescue groups like Orlando Rabbit Care and Adoption, which said it would help reduce the number of people who got rabbits as impulse buys or starter pets for kids, unaware of how much work they can be.
But the bill failed to get passed its first committee in the Florida House, and its Senate companion didn’t get any further.
Waldron says she’s open to making changes to the bill to get it through committees.
In the last few years, neighborhoods have been overwhelmed by rabbit colonies that groups like ORCA say are formed when people turn domestic rabbits loose outdoors.
It’s difficult to determine the sexes of young rabbits. A person may think they are getting two rabbits of the same sex, but then discover the rabbits were of opposite sexes when there is a fresh litter of babies.
A female rabbit takes 30 days to give birth and can also get pregnant the day they give birth. Two rabbits can easily become dozens within a matter of months.
That’s what happened in Orlando’s Azalea Park neighborhood in 2022. ORCA, with the help of animal services and the sheriff’s office, wrangled some 35 rabbits from a neighborhood that started when someone let some rabbits loose there.
In 2023, ORCA had 400 requests to take in 700 rabbits in the Central Florida area.
South Florida has also seen its share of rabbit colonies.
In Wilton Manors, a rescue had to come in and remove rabbits last summer, where neighbors say a breeder released the rabbits when they moved away. They believed there were hundreds of rabbits.
In Cooper City, a neighborhood faced a similar problem in 2022. Harter said there have been other rabbit colonies in Miami and the Tampa area.
Orange County banned sales of rabbits, dogs and cats in its unincorporated areas back in 2022. Dozens of local governments also ban retail sales of dogs and cats, but not rabbits, according to the Humane Society of the United States.
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