Every year at this time, too many parents get the overwhelming urge to give a kid a bunny for Easter. It all starts wonderfully. The kid is thrilled, the parents are ecstatic, the photographs and memories will last a lifetime, but the sad fact is, it rarely turns out well for the rabbit.

Rabbits can be great pets, but you have to know what you are doing, and it takes work. They need vet care just like any other pet, and they need attention and socialization. Too often the kid’s attention turns to something else, and the parents don’t have the time or even want to be bothered, and the rabbit gets ignored. And then vacation time comes along.

A few months after Easter, these bunnies start getting dumped. Shelters take as many as they can, and organizations such as the North Georgia House Rabbit Society will take in and care for all that they can, but it is all so unnecessary. Some people will try to return the rabbit to the store they bought it from, but the store doesn’t want it back. There is no market for a grown rabbit, or at best a very limited one. If a store does agree to take back a rabbit, the odds are good that it is destined to be snake food.

Then there are those who decide to just set it free so it can live in the wild with the other rabbits. Except this isn’t Peter Cottontail they are turning loose; these are domestic rabbits bred to be pets. A white rabbit has absolutely no chance of survival in the wild. Nor does any other domestic rabbit. This year, no matter how cute the bunnies are, give the kid a chocolate bunny, a stuffed rabbit, a velveteen rabbit, just not the real thing.