08/27/2026
Meet Pandora, Chanel, and Coach. A little girl's love is the reason they're here.
These three young bunnies came to Great Lakes Rabbit Sanctuary from a family in West Michigan, thanks to a friend who generously covered their transport all the way across the state to us. We are so grateful to her.
The family had signed up for a 4-H market rabbit project. But somewhere along the way, a little girl did what children do best. She paid attention. She noticed that Pandora, Chanel, and Coach have personalities and quirks and favorite things. One is bolder than the others. They each like what they like. They stopped being "items" and became someone. And once you know a bunny as a someone, you cannot hand them over to be slaughtered at the end of the summer.
So this family made a brave, loving choice. To keep the bunnies they had come to love, they bought them back at the auction, the very sale meant to send them to slaughter, and got them out. Today all three are safe, and we could not be more grateful to a little girl who chose compassion.
Here is what many families do not know when they sign up.
4-H rabbit programs usually offer a few tracks. Pet and breeding rabbits generally go home with the child. But market and meat pen projects are what the programs themselves call "terminal." The goal is to raise a rabbit to a target weight in a matter of weeks, show it, and sell it into the meat auction. Pandora, Chanel, and Coach were just 8 weeks old when they were meant to be slaughtered, barely out of babyhood. Fair paperwork in county after county spells it out plainly. Market rabbits are loaded by fair officials for slaughter. Think about what that means for a child who has grown attached. To save the animal she raised, she has to outbid a slaughter buyer for her own rabbit.
It is worth naming what this asks of a young person. A child is handed a baby animal, told to feed it, care for it, and grow close to it, and then told to hand it over to be killed. This is hard with any animal, and rabbits leave no room for pretending otherwise. They are curious, funny, opinionated little individuals, exactly as this little girl discovered.
There are welfare concerns during the project too. Fairs happen at the height of summer, and rabbits do not tolerate heat well. They cannot pant or sweat effectively, and temperatures above the mid 80s can be dangerous or even fatal. Yet market rabbits are transported to and shown at outdoor summer fairgrounds as a condition of the project.
Families carry responsibility here too. Signing a child up for a project that ends in slaughter is a serious decision, and it deserves real research before the first bunny comes home, not after a child has fallen in love. Too many families do not learn what "market" and "terminal" actually mean until it is too late to opt out easily. We ask families to look closely first, and we remind everyone that a program built to treat a gentle companion animal as a short-term commodity is a program worth questioning.
Now Pandora, Chanel, and Coach need the rest of us to carry the story forward. Each of them needs to be spayed, which protects their health and their years ahead, and each spay costs $300. We are looking for sponsors for each girl, whether you can cover a full spay or give toward one. Every amount adds up, and together we can get all three girls to surgery. We will update this post as each girl's spay is sponsored. Donation link is in the comments.
$25/$900 raised for their spay surgeries.
