Dear friends of House Rabbit Society,

As some of you may have heard, PetSmart is now going to be selling rabbits.
Following is a letter that we are sending to PetSmart today, and putting on
our website, regarding their decision and HRS's position on that. Please
feel free to forward this letter, and the "What you can Do" information
following it, to anyone and everyone you think might be interested.

July 14, 2007

Robert F. Moran
President and Chief Operating Officer
PetSmart, Inc.
19601 North 27th Avenue
Phoenix, AZ 85027

Dear Mr. Moran,

I am writing this letter in response to PetSmart’s recently announced
decision to sell purpose-bred, baby dwarf rabbits in PetSmart stores. For
some time now, House Rabbit Society and other rabbit rescue organizations
have enjoyed mutually beneficial relationships with their local PetSmart
stores, placing rescued and adoptable rabbits through adoption programs at
those stores. To say that House Rabbit Society is disappointed by PetSmart's
violation of its own commitment to save rescued animals would be a gross
understatement. I’m sure you can understand why PetSmart’s decision to sell
rabbits feels like such a betrayal, after all the work done by your
partnering organizations to place homeless rabbits through your stores.

PetSmart’s proposed sale of rabbits goes against everything that PetSmart
itself claims to stand for. According to the Humane Society of the United
States, rabbits are the third most-frequently relinquished species at
shelters across the country – a huge, and largely hidden, problem, because
many members of the general public are simply not aware of it. PetSmart
claims that its sale of baby rabbits will not exacerbate this problem
because 1) all PetSmart dwarf rabbits will be spayed/neutered prior to sale,
and PetSmart employees will be “trained to instruct the public” regarding
their care; 2) PetSmart will perform “customer-satisfaction surveys” after
the purchase of a rabbit and will have a 14-day return policy, in case the
rabbit “doesn’t work out.” Let me address each of these points.

1) Although spaying/neutering does indeed prevent further reproduction, it
does not prevent – or even acknowledge – the myriad other reasons why so
many rabbits end up in shelters. These problems can be prevented only by
skilled, up-front screening of all potential adopters by rabbit caregivers
with long-term, first-hand knowledge of companion rabbits. This skill is
not something that can be acquired overnight. While your sales staff may go
through a limited training before being tasked with caring for and adopting
out these complicated animals, our own volunteers go through a minimum of a
year of training before they are qualified to educate the public about
rabbits. Our HRS veterinarians have received substantial additional training
and experience with rabbits (since companion rabbit medicine, with rare
exceptions, is not part of the curriculum in veterinary medical schools),
and as a group, have treated and cared for tens of thousands of rabbits over
the last couple of decades alone. It is regrettable that you have chosen to
ignore all of this education and experience when considering the sale of
rabbits in your stores.

2) To do its “survey,” will PetSmart contact its customers after several
weeks? Months? Years? Throughout the lifetime of the rabbit (up to ten
years or more)? In our experience, rabbits can be abandoned due to a change
in the owners’ circumstances many months or even years after the initial
purchase. PetSmart’s 14-day return policy will simply not provide the
window that is needed for all of the PetSmart rabbits that will be abandoned
months or years after purchase. Many will be dropped off at animal
shelters, where, if not adopted or rescued by groups like House Rabbit
Society, they will be euthanized. Others will simply be released into
neighborhoods or wilderness areas because of the tragically mistaken belief
that a companion rabbit set loose will join a wild rabbit family. Instead,
these rabbits fall victim to dogs, cats, raccoons, raptors, and automobiles.
Will the numbers of rabbits euthanized thanks to PetSmart’s new rabbit sales
program be subtracted from the number of rabbits PetSmart Charities claims
to have saved? Will PetSmart agree to take back any rabbit purchased at any
of its stores, over the rabbit’s 10-year lifespan? That is precisely what
we, and many other rescue organizations, agree to do when we adopt out a
rabbit, because it is the only way to assure the rabbit will not end up in a
shelter again.

The HRS members and representatives who have already contacted PetSmart have
been given various reasons for PetSmart’s decision.

We have been told that PetSmart is responding to “market demand:” customers
come into a store looking for rabbits, and PetSmart wants to meet this
demand. What happens if customers come in asking for puppies and kittens?
Will PetSmart let this demand go unmet? Are rabbits less worthy of PetSmart
’s protection than puppies and kittens?

We have been informed that PetSmart made its decision only after consulting
with a team of “pet care experts.” House Rabbit Society, the largest
repository of rabbit care experts in the world, was never consulted, nor, as
far as we know, was any other rabbit rescue organization. HRS not only has
more information on the demanding levels of care needed by rabbits than your
own staff, but our volunteers know more about the surplus rabbit problem
than any pet store ever could, since they deal with it on a daily basis.

We have also been told that PetSmart selected baby dwarf rabbits as the
“best type of rabbit for a family.” This flies in the face of what most
rabbit rescuers know from experience, and points to how sadly misinformed
PetSmart’s decision is. Baby rabbits – like baby animals of any kind – are
more destructive and require much more training and supervision than more
mature animals, and dwarf rabbits are often significantly more skittish and
harder to handle than larger rabbits. Further, dwarf rabbits have a higher
incidence of dental disease due to their small, shortened head shape, and
this can mean expensive veterinary care as often as every other month. And
finally, the pediatric surgeries that are required to produce sale-ready,
baby rabbits may have potentially serious negative health effects. For
example, it is known in other small mammals that bone density is decreased
when these pediatric procedures are performed. In a rabbit, who already has
a lightweight and fragile skeleton, this additional bone loss could be a
serious problem in later years.

Contrary to popular belief, rabbits are not low-maintenance animals. In
fact, compared to dogs and cats, they are actually high-maintenance pets.
The hundreds of phone calls that we receive every week demonstrate that
people who purchase rabbits at pet stores simply do not attain enough
information on how to care for them, nor do they commit to the ten years or
more that a rabbit will live. While you maintain that your veterinarians
will teach your staff about rabbit care, we know that pet store staff, like
so many service employees throughout this country, are generally short-term
or part-time employees, often teenagers, most of whom have never lived with
even one rabbit, let alone the scores that our volunteers have lived with.
They simply do not have the knowledge, skills, or inclination to properly
educate the public about these complex animals.

As the world’s largest rabbit rescue organization with a presence in forty
states and six countries, and a website that gets over a million hits per
week, House Rabbit Society has played the leading role in rescuing and
placing abandoned rabbits. In our twenty years of rescue work, we have
rescued over 20,000 rabbits, and our members look to us to fight the
continued breeding and sale of rabbits, and to prevent as many of their
deaths as we can. We are deeply concerned about this issue, since the vast
majority of the pet rabbits we rescue and rehabilitate were originally
purchased through pet stores and breeders.

There simply is no excuse in this day and age for a company with a
reputation for compassion to continue to sell animals, but especially
animals that are abandoned and euthanized at the rate that dogs, cats, and
rabbits are. For PetSmart to feign ignorance or imply that the deaths of
rabbits do not matter is repugnant to the men and women around the country
who have dedicated their lives to saving these animals.

House Rabbit Society will be informing our members of PetSmart’s decision to
place dollars over lives, and will encourage our members and allies to shop
elsewhere for their pet supplies. As a national licensing organization, HRS
does not prohibit its individual chapters from deciding for themselves whom
they will partner with in their adoption activities. We recognize that some
of our chapters have built strong and mutually productive relationships with
some PetSmart stores, and we will not interfere with these. But as a
national rescue organization, we can tell you that many of our chapters do
not want to work with any organization that sells or breeds rabbits, and are
extremely distressed by PetSmart's decision. We also will be speaking with
the many dog and cat rescue groups that PetSmart works with to let them know
of your decision.

In closing, on behalf of the Board of Directors of House Rabbit Society, I
ask that PetSmart immediately reconsider its proposal regarding the sale of
rabbits in PetSmart stores. PetSmart has honored its policy not to sell
puppies and kittens in any of its stores; we ask that you extend the same
protection to rabbits, and remember that compassion should not be limited to
one or two animal species.

I eagerly await your response to our request. Please do not hesitate to
contact me if you need further information or clarification on anything
covered in this letter. Finally, if PetSmart executives would like a
face-to-face meeting with members of our board, we will go out of our way to
arrange this.

Sincerely,

Kathleen Wilsbach, Ph.D.
President
House Rabbit Society

cc:
Anita Garcia, Manager of Adoptions, PetSmart Services and Store Operations
Philip L. Francis, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
David K. Lenhardt, Senior Vice President, Services and Store Operations
Mary Miller, Senior Vice President, Chief Marketing Officer
Sophie Engelhard Craighead, President of the Board, PetSmart Charities
****

What You Can Do Regarding PetSmart's Sale of Rabbits

Please let PetSmart know that you are unhappy with their decision to sell
rabbits in their stores, rather than reach out to more rabbit rescue groups
to expand their rabbit adoption programs. Please send PetSmart a polite
letter or email, or give them a call to let them know of your concerns, via
the contact information below:

Email: http://www.petsmart.com/global/customerservice/contactUsForm.jsp
Phone: (800) 738-1385
Fax: (623) 580-6502
Snail mail:
PetSmart, Inc.
19601 North 27th Avenue
Phoenix, AZ 85027