After posting on Living Sky Wildlife Rehabilitation social media sites that they had success last year with bringing jackrabbits and horseshoe hares back to health, other rehab organizations were calling from across the country to find out what they did differently.

That, from Executive Director Jan Shadick who says these jackrabbits and hares are notorious for not doing well with rehabilitation.

Living Sky was able to release about 50 per cent of the rabbits and hares brought to them, which Shadick considers a miracle.

She explains that they looked at what other people were doing, including using a particular food, but that didn’t seem to work, so they went back to the old food which is from the United States and is very expensive. They would change one thing at a time and see if it made a difference and one of those things that made a difference was using distilled water instead of tap water.

She notes that many baby rabbits don’t need to be rescued. They are left alone by their moms, so they are most often not being abandoned. She advises everyone to take that into consideration if you see a baby rabbit alone, unless you can tell it has been injured.