Pet rabbit owners live in dread of killer virus

Anxious pet rabbit owners are turning their homes into miniquarantine centres to keep out viruses that will kill their pets.

Rabbits are being locked away where once they enjoyed roaming a home.

Owners are changing clothes and shoes when they visit their pets so they don’t carry the disease to them.

Flyscreens are going up because a single fly can deliver the rabbit haemorrhagic virus diseases. Many owners won’t buy veges from the supermarket because they might have been in contact with a wild rabbit that has the disease.

Rabbit owner Beth Fitzgerald said she was scared to take her dog for a walk in case it brings back the virus. She disinfects its paws before it gets back to near the rabbits.

The anxiety being felt across the pet rabbit community is the result of multiple releases of the RHVD virus, which is used to control rabbits on farmland.

The disease kills rabbits in an agonising way. Rabbits take a day or two to die from internal haemorrhaging and they can squeal and scream while waiting for death.

The original disease,

RHVDV1, was released illegally and ineffectively by Otago farmers in 1997.

Its effectiveness waned as wild rabbits gained immunity and a legal release of a new strain

RHVD-K5 was made in MarchApril this year to knock them back. But in May it was reported a third strain of the disease had been found in Marlborough, which was not an official release.

Fitzgerald said an initial shipment of 1000 vaccines was brought into New Zealand, with more to come, but there are an estimated 160,000 domestic rabbits, so she expected thousands of pet deaths.

‘‘This would never be allowed to happen to any other species.

‘‘Imagine the uproar if dogs started haemorrhaging and dying painfully at home.

‘‘Rabbits are so undervalued in society and a person’s relationship with their rabbit is so undervalued.’’

Trying to protect the rabbits is like being trapped in a science fiction movie, where an attack from an invisible threat can come from anywhere at any time. In good conditions, the virus can live for up to seven months.

It can survive on the sole of a shoe for that long.

It can live on clothes and vegetables, but the most common way it travels is on the feet of flies.

Nelson breeder Alanah Wasley is worried because she lives near where the third virus was first found.

She is strict on cage cleaning to avoid flies, only uses hay that has been off the fields for more than three months, and changes into special shoes to visit her rabbits. All visitors are asked to leave their shoes in their car.

She feeds her rabbits veges only from her own garden.

Wasley said a rabbit death from the virus would give children nightmares.

‘‘Its symptoms are the equivalent of the ebola virus, except it is rabbits and they are writhing in pain and squealing. ‘‘It’s very inhumane.

‘‘We would never do this to a dog or cat, so why rabbits?’’

Fitzgerald said there had been a lot of deaths in Australia where the K5 virus was released.

Rabbit lovers have set up memorial pages online and she said some Australian owners were so traumatised over the deaths they said they would never have rabbits again.