Homer council to hear ordinance letting residents live-trap feral rabbits

The Homer City Council will hold a public hearing Monday on an ordinance that would let residents live-trap feral rabbits on their own property. Trappers couldn't turn the rabbits loose, and the city's animal shelter says it can't take most of them.

City code has banned trapping in Homer for 21 years, including humane live traps on a resident's own land. The ban reportedly followed an incident in which a prominent resident's cat was caught in a neighbor's snare, council members Davis and Aderhold, the sponsors, wrote in a memo to the council.

When the council took up the ordinance Sept. 28, members said residents had asked for the change because rabbits were damaging their homes and they felt "in legal limbo," according to draft minutes. On one property, two rabbits at the start of summer had become 20.

The ordinance would allow property owners and tenants to catch feral rabbits, rats, mice and voles alive and without injury in a cage or box trap, checking it at least every 12 hours. Snowshoe hares, squirrels, furbearers, cats, dogs and birds are excluded.

A substitute version on Monday's agenda says captured animals must receive "humane disposition" and can't be abandoned or released. It lists adoption, giving them away as pets or surrendering them to a shelter or refuge willing to take them, and rules out drowning, freezing, starving or illegally shooting them. It doesn't otherwise address killing them.

Homer Animal Services Director Jillian Rogers wrote that the shelter supports humane live trapping but may only take individual rabbits tame enough to be adopted. The shelter "cannot serve as a destination for trapped feral rabbits generally," she wrote.

On Sept. 28, the council voted 6-0 against an amendment requiring that a captured animal's final disposition, "including any dispatch," be humane, after members noted the ordinance didn't define "humane." The substitute adds a definition. The council then introduced the ordinance 5-1, with Venuti opposed.

Some residents urged pet owner education and more shelter funding instead. Anna Lewald, a registered nurse, wrote urging the council to pass it, calling the rabbits pests that pose health risks to residents and pets.