Charity warns owners of chain-store rabbit hutches could be breaking the law

Rabbit hutches sold by Britain's largest retail chains are so small that they are tantamount to animal cruelty and could cause owners to inadvertently break the law, an animal welfare charity has warned. With greater numbers of rabbits being sold as children's pets during the school holidays, the Rabbit Welfare Association & Fund (RWAF) urged retailers to improve their hutches.

Britain's largest specialist rabbit welfare charity, the RWAF said Argos and Homebase, for example, both sold a £70 hutch that is only 77cm long but is marketed as big enough to allow rabbits to "stretch on their hind legs and run freely". The charity said the hutch was barely half the size recommended for laboratory rabbits kept for experiments, while four separate hutches in the Argos range were smaller than the minimum for lab rabbits. The RWAF said this was hypocritical because Argos had earned "cruelty-free" status from the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection.



Laboratory rabbits spend a relatively small amount of time in hutches, but domestic rabbits may live in theirs for up to 12 years. Any hutch smaller than 122cm x 45cm (4ft x 1ft approximately) gives a floor area below the minimum requirement for laboratory rabbits. Rae Todd, of the RWAF, said: "Pet rabbits can live in hutches provided they're big enough for rabbits to hop around, stretch and jump up, and as long as they're attached to a permanent exercise area. But keeping rabbits cooped up alone in hutches of the type sold by these big retail chains is just tantamount to cruelty."

There is no legal minimum size for a hutch, but the Animal Welfare Act makes it a legal obligation for owners to provide for the needs of their pets, including somewhere suitable to live, the ability to express normal behaviour and being housed with (or apart from) other animals. The RWAF said rabbit owners cannot meet these legal obligations if they keep their rabbit alone in a hutch. It added that a hutch should only ever be a shelter as part of a larger living area, and never the sole accommodation.