Earlier in the week, a Los Angeles blogger visited the campus of LBCC and wrote a column about its charming yet pestering population of rabbits. Many sites simply linked to the story (read it here), but today Miles Nevin takes the time to provide a little historical background.
Colleges in Long Beach cannot just be defined as institutions of higher education where professors teach, students learn, and society progresses from the advancement of thought and research. In Long Beach, colleges are home to many animals – fish, cats, squirrels and rabbits. The fish are quite beautifully contained in the Earl Burns Miller Japanese Gardens at Cal State Long Beach. That campus is also home to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of tree-climbing squirrels. So I guess those are somewhat contained too. You all know about the cats, having occupied several area newspapers for way-too-many-months as a result of increase coyote sightings. But the rabbits, what about the rabbits? Here’s a brief history…
There are hundreds of them, and they reside and often disrupt life at Long Beach City College’s Liberal Arts Campus (the larger one located on Carson Street).
According to the LBCC History Book, The Liberal Arts Campus opened in 1935 in the Lakewood Village area. “The new campus was still surrounded by bean, alfalfa and carrot fields,” it reads. “The whole area contained very few people but thousands of rabbits. The cottontails at the Liberal Arts Campus and jackrabbits from the Long Beach Airport are presumably descendants of these earliest fauna.”
Current estimates place the rabbit population at 350. About 60 reside south of Carson, the remainder on the north side. Within one month of this publication, those 60 will likely turn into 80 or 90, as they reproduce every 26 days. They are all related, except for one old lop-eared bunny someone dropped off a few weeks ago. He was noticed quickly by caregiver and former Outstanding Colleague recipient Jacque Olson, who discovered him one Sunday morning, visibly bloody and beaten up by his new rabbit family.
On the south side of Carson, rabbit drop-offs occur much more regularly, probably weekly. Conventional wisdom is that the already dense rabbit population creates an inviting, safe drop-off environment for these domestic pets. It is anything but safe. Domestic rabbits end up being beaten and killed by existing ones, or eaten by the owls, hawks, foxes, coyotes or feral cats. There is also a lack of shelter and food dispensers. In speaking with LBCC officials, I’m reminded that it is against the law to abandon domestic pets, and punishable by a $500 fine in Penal Code 5975, and rabbits in the city of Long Beach are classified domestic pets.
The rabbits are a mixed bag – charming to many, but very detrimental in other ways. They chew through the irrigation system and have developed their own world under the many buildings on both sides of Carson, between Clark on the East and Lakewood on the West. Filling bunny holes is a task very difficult to keep up with. Cleaning up their deposits is frustrating too.
Rumor has it that a committee is being considered to deal with, care for, and discuss issues surrounding these indigenous residents of the Lakewood Village area. We will report on that when the time comes. In the meanwhile, STOP DROPPING OFF YOUR PETS!
Thank you to Camille Bolton of LBCC for providing information on this story.