Leaping Rhino: The Rabbit Who Opened the Door to Change
- Mallory Cormier, Justify Board Secretary & Treasurer
- Sep 25
- 5 min read
Updated: 3 hours ago
One of my core memories from working in the lab is about a rabbit named Rhino. Although that was not her “real” name, as she was given a number that was tattooed inside her ear, she left an imprint on my heart forever inspiring my personal mission to rescue rabbits in labs.
Rhino was a spirited bun who, despite her predicament of being captive in a lab, was very much herself. She was one of the many hundreds of rabbits who were being bred for their milk in a pharmaceutical breeding facility with the intent to produce a drug for humans with blood-clotting disorders. She was a New Zealand white rabbit who possessed the genetic makeup needed for this purpose. Her purpose: to be bred and milked and then bred and milked, over and over again until she was no longer deemed “productive.”
Rhino was given that name because she was wild. Not wild in the fact as a wild rabbit, but her personality radiated energy and “free will.” She was one of the only rabbits who figured out how to remove her food hopper and jump out of her cage.
Oftentimes, she would be found in the morning hopping around on the floor causing mischief and antagonizing the other rabbits still in cages. Myself and the other animal caretakers pinned the name Rhino for her because every time she would escape her cage, she would charge at the person trying to catch her, just like a rhino.
When it was her time to be milked, she would often jump out of the transport cart or stand in the cart on her hind legs looking around with curiosity at the rabbits surrounding her. She was quite a character and enjoyed being petted by lab staff. As a mother to her kits (baby rabbits), she would always make sure to nurse them and often made little cooing sounds of contentment as she hopped into her nest box to check on them.
As a rabbit in a lab, there was no real “enrichment”... maybe a plastic ball, a metal triangle, and then grain that came once a day at this particular lab. Other than that, life in the lab for these sentient, highly intelligent beings was tortuously unfulfilling and psychologically damaging. Those kits though, they were an outlet for most of the female rabbits housed in that facility. They LOVED their babies and I think motherhood really gave them purpose and hope, and Rhino was no exception to this.
Rhino’s mentality before she was bred and milked regularly was bright, energetic and almost humorous. She had a light inside of her that radiated regardless of what was happening all around in that lab.
After Rhino had been bred for the fourth or fifth time, she started to change. She stopped hopping out of her cage at night because she had been moved to an area that prevented her from escaping. She started losing weight and her fur began to fall out at an alarming rate. She aborted two litters and started to show signs of depression. Rhino was no longer that curious, bright rabbit. She was a shell of herself and was being consumed by the cold, draining despair this lab had become to her.
Looking back now, some may call it farfetched, but I feel I also experienced something similar to what Rhino went through. Of course, her experience was FAR worse than mine, but I can’t help but feel there was a connection there. My spirit was bright and energetic when I began the job and by the end, I had completely changed. I had the delusional idea that I was going to be able to help all these animals have great lives and create change for those rabbits in the lab by advocating for adoption, enrichment and better husbandry. That was far from the truth.
As time went on, and more and more rabbits deteriorated like Rhino, the truth of the work I was doing came crashing down on me. I started losing weight. I became withdrawn. I began uncontrollably crying while working at the lab and then ultimately, I started dismissing my feelings so hard that I forgot HOW to feel emotions. I was a shell of myself, just like Rhino in her cage. But the difference was that I could leave.
I could have all the comforts and joy that I wanted outside of the lab and Rhino could not. She could not feel the sun on her face, graze on greens and grasses, leap long bounds in large spaces, enjoy raising her babies, or rest her sensitive furred paws on solid ground. She would not have any of that and none of those poor rabbits would and that became the reality I couldn’t ignore.
No longer was I convinced that what I was contributing to was for a “greater good” or a “necessary evil of science” and no longer did I want to be a part of this type of violence and disregard of living beings.
I gave my two weeks notice, expressed my ongoing concern for the animal welfare issues I had with the facility in my exit interview and left professionally.
Fast forward eight years, I have established the nonprofit, Save The Buns, Inc., whose mission is to provide adoption or sanctuary to rabbits who have been used in animal testing.
To date, we have provided adoption over euthanasia for multiple buns, which was one of the main goals I wanted to accomplish when I worked in the lab, and we successfully established a "Bun Club" which is an agreement made between Save The Buns and a lab that if they have rabbits that are no longer needed for testing, we will be contacted to provide adoption or sanctuary to those buns.
Now there is one particular rescue that really made all of this come full circle. Two rabbits, who were named Shrimp and Little Foot by the animal caretakers in the lab, were released to Save The Buns because they were no longer needed for testing. Typically, euthanasia takes place when animals in research are no longer needed.
Fortunately, this lab agreed to sign Shrimp and Little Foot over to us so we could facilitate finding adoptive homes for them. Both bun boys adjusted well and you could tell they were clearly loved in the lab, hence the names, and also how social they were. However, something unusual started happening and I still cannot really explain it. I started calling Little Foot, Rhino by mistake. It just kept slipping off my tongue and I couldn’t control it.
Now, some may say I’m a bit outlandish, but I truly feel in my gut everything happens for a reason and sometimes the unexplained is really just the universe coming back around to remind us what’s important. Although my friends and family thought I was spending a little too much time with rabbits when I told them about my epiphany, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Rhino’s spirit had something to do with these slip-ups.
It was clearly a no-brainer that I needed to adopt Little Foot, so I renamed him Crouton Rhino in memory of the bun I could not save from the lab. He is now a sanctuary bun who will live the remainder of his life in peace, eating all the greens he wants, leaping long, binkying free, being his bun-self and, most importantly, being a consistent reminder to save more buns from labs.
