Rabbit Lovers Rise to the Bait

It seems the retirees of Laguna Woods will go to great lengths to save the bunnies--including acts of underground resistance.

Few involved will talk about it, but over the last several weeks, a loose coalition of senior citizens--call it the Rabbit Resistance League--has resumed a campaign of purloining poison bait boxes set out for the wild rabbits that have been devouring the landscape at the Leisure World retirement complex.

“A few of them I know,” one elderly woman admitted cagily, insisting she be identified only as a resistance-league sympathizer. “One of my neighbors will say to me, ‘Have you seen the box down the street?’ And I’ll say, ‘Oh, really?’ And then it disappears.”

The campaign’s roots go back two years, when a number of Leisure World residents--working with such animal-rights groups as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals--objected to the retirement community’s use of poison to kill rabbits.

The thievery, and the abatement program, fell off when the rabbit population decreased. But a bumper crop of bunnies this spring led landscapers to put out more bait boxes, which were noticed by some of the seniors, said Lani Gillis, a Laguna Niguel resident who has lobbied Leisure World to halt the poisonings.

The underground resistance was back in business.

Terry Quinlan, spokeswoman for Professional Community Management, which manages Leisure World, said the poisoning program is necessary to keep the rabbit population in check. The bait boxes are put out under guidelines established by the Orange County Department of Agriculture.

Despite the stealth campaign to steal the boxes, Quinlan said, landscapers haven’t noticed that any of them have gone missing.

“They will,” Gillis said. “I know for a fact six [were taken] this week.”

Orange County’s rabbit wars have simmered for years as new developments have crowded out such predators as coyotes while fresh suburban landscaping has provided rabbits with protection and all-they-can-eat buffets.

Last year, a rabbit infestation at Leisure World-Seal Beach had managers ready to enact a shoot-on-sight policy using pellet guns until city officials rejected the plan over safety concerns.

Poisoning, though, has been the control method of choice, which led two animal-rights groups to sue the state Department of Fish and Game in April, arguing that the agency does not enforce laws the groups say ban poisoning of wild rabbits.

The Animal Protection Institute and In Defense of Animals contend that nine gated Orange County communities contract with pest control companies to poison cottontail rabbits with diphacinone, an odorless, pale-yellow, crystalline powder that is mixed with bait and causes animals that eat it to bleed to death over several days.

Diphacinone is approved by the state’s Environmental Protection Agency, but animal lovers condemn its use as inhumane and point out that the poisoned bait can have unintended victims.

“It’s a really ugly, cruel death,” said Gillis, whose mother used to live in Leisure World-Laguna Woods. “It affects the whole environment. People’s pets have been killed. Who knows how much wildlife has been killed?”

The state Department of Pesticide Regulation in the 1970s approved the use of diphacinone for controlling jack rabbits. Special approval was granted about 10 years ago to use the poison to control cottontail rabbits in Orange County, said department spokesman Glenn Brank, though he did not know why that additional permission was granted.

Leisure World might have to find another way to control the rabbits, though. Steve Hill, deputy commissioner for the county agricultural commission, said state officials last week revised the approved uses of diphacinone, saying it can be used on cottontails only in connection with agricultural production.

That means killing rabbits to protect the pansies rimming the front lawn is no longer allowed. It was unclear late Tuesday whether other poisons have been approved for that use.

Jerry Rathje, landscape supervisor at Leisure World, said his crews have put out about 150 of the poison boxes as part of an eradication program that began about five years ago.

Most of the traps are put out in response to complaints from residents about damaged flower beds or other problems, he said.

“Generally, we’re responding to requests by residents who are telling us that things are getting out of hand and to come do something,” he said.

Rathje said the traps are anchored according to regulations. Workers check them every week or so, and the most recent count found only one trap unaccounted for, he said.

The next count could be off by more, though, according to sources close to the underground.

One sympathizer, a 77-year-old man, described the resistance league’s operations as part evening promenade, part stealth, as elderly women zip around the 2,100-acre complex on motorized carts searching for the black boxes left by the daytime landscaping crew.

“They spot these little boxes and before you know it, they aren’t there the next day,” said the sympathizer, who has been known to whisper box locations into the ears of people who know what to do with them.

“It’s just sort of a brigade of ladies that, if you see [a box] and mention it to them, it goes into a garbage bag and onto the back of their cart. It’s gone. It’s gone and it’s the funniest thing ever.”