It’s Easter morning and you’ve just woken up to find an Easter basket at the foot of your bed.  You quickly make your way over to it to find a cute little LIVE bunny in it.  You try to pick it up but it doesn’t want to be held.  It’s afraid and it wants to hide because it’s not a toy, it’s a living creature.

Many people buy live animals as Easter basket gifts for friends, family, and especially children.  But they do not seem to realize what will happen to the baby bunny, chick, or duckling once it becomes the responsibility of a person that does not know how to care for it.  Many children who receive these gifts are not ready for the responsibility of taking car of a living animal.

Baby bunnies, chicks, and ducklings are fragile and need to be handled gently.  There are many stories of these small animals being dropped, stepped on, or even squeezed to death by young children simply because they are not ready for the responsibility of taking care of these baby animals.

Many people also don’t realise how much time, effort, and money you have to put into raising a bunny, chick, or duckling and if these animals aren’t taken care of properly, it could lead to the baby bunny, chick, or duckling’s death.

But even if the bunny, chick, or duckling does not manage to die while it’s young, then you’ve got a full grown bunny, duck, chicken, or even worse, rooster on your hands.  At this point the animals aren’t usually wanted anymore.  While some of them make their way to shelters, a lot of them are are abandoned to the wild as animal shelters have no more room.  The problem is that domestic bunnies, chickens, and ducks cannot live in the wild.  They are too well accustomed to domestic life to make the change to living in the outdoors.  They will most likely soon die after being released.

It’s all a very sad story but it’s true, this is what happens to most live Easter presents.  You can help stop this though by not getting someone a live animal as a present for Easter.  But if you really think you are ready for the responsibility of taking of one of these animals, adopt from a shelter and not go to a breeder.  Every bunny, chicken, and duck counts.