Huh?
My most recent Adsense ad was for a Pet Store selling a rabbit for Easter.
That said, I have bought my kids rabbits, because we keep them as household pets. But never for Easter. The last time was right around Christmas, though.
I acquired my rabbit when he was found wandering on the street by a concerned bystander and handed over to a local vet who adopted him out to me.
It was about a month after Easter, and he was about 8 weeks old, so yeah.
I’ve just come back from Indonesia and dyed chicks were on sale in the markets there. They get raised and become normal egg-laying hens when adult.
The last time I saw this done was around 1982 and they required the parents to have some sort of farm to take them to eventually.
OK. I get that rabbits are pets. And chickens could be pets, or egg layers. But, WHY Easter? Why dyed? And why a gift to children? Seems very cruel, insensitive, and inhumane. What am I missing?
Easter because chicks and bunnies are associated with Easter. Dyed for the same reason. To children because it is common to give children pets.
Giving a live toy to a child without any concrete plan of what you will do with the animal after the holiday is certainly cruel. But if you were thinking it would be nice to get your child a pet bunny, I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t deliver it on Easter, or even why you shouldn’t dye it’s fur. Rabbits don’t groom much, I’m sure a little food coloring wouldn’t do them any harm. Christmas is a zoo, and I think it’s a bad idea to introduce a pet to the household under the Christmas tree, but Easter would be okay in most households, I’d think.
There’s a feed store down the street from my dad’s house. Every year around this time they have a big tiered thing in the middle of the store full of baby chicks. Maybe some people bought them for Easter, but most of them were destined for farms. It was a real rural community back then.
They also had ducklings, and one year a turkey chick. I miss that tiered chick thing.
You’ve never lived with a Rabbit, have you?
I assure you that Rabbits groom themselves, groom each other, and (if you are lucky) groom their humans with great frequency.
(Caution: Clicking links will lead to extreme cuteness.)
I had pet rabbits as a kid, but they mostly lived in a hutch in the back yard. I don’t recall them grooming, but I guess I am wrong on that one.
My brother rescued a couple of rabbits that his neighbors apparently bought for Easter baskets, and then abandoned when they moved a few weeks later. They were named Stew and Hossenfeffer.
Bro also rescued a chick that a neighbor kid got for Easter, back in the eighties. Doc grew up to be a pretty Rhode Island red hen who thought she was a dog.
During the mid 80s I got a pet rabbit for Easter.
Wonderful Pet. 
I give chicks and bunnies but it sorts it out in the end as I only keep them until October, when I give the black cat I just adopted a final feast before sacrificing the cat to Crom. Then I simply unleash wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes to clean up the mess.
My parents gave my brother and I some baby chicks in the mid-80’s for Easter. Granted, my mother then kept the chicks and we had eggs for a couple-three years before the chickens finally died through attrition (the experiment with us eating the male chickens for dinner was destined to failure as soon as we named them). Since I grew up in rural Alaska, “attrition” largely meant some combination of random wildlife and neighborhood dogs.
Did you know that both ravens and bald eagles view chickens as a delicious noontime snack? Seeing a bald eagle swoop down and carry off a chicken was an exciting sight for 8 year old me. Even more exciting was watching it dismember and then eat the chicken in a nearby tree. The sound effects were pretty epic also.
Then again, there was also a lady in my home town who raised rabbits as pets and for fibers since she made and sold yarn and fabric products who made a few extra bucks around Easter by renting out her bunnies to families for the weekend. You could rent an adult or baby bunny (your choice) for the weekend and then return it to her to live the rest of its bunny life well cared for. If your kids wanted to adopt it, you could also do that - with a lengthy lesson in care and feeding and the information that you could always return the bunny if things didn’t work out.
I read about a woman protesting this in a book published in 1966.
I got two baby chicks for Easter one year when I was about 8 (in the mid ‘60s). We were at the grandparents for Easter and the grandparents had a farm. I think they were chicks from my grandparents’ hens. I played with the chicks while I was there, gave them names, and then when I left they joined the other chickens in the coop. I can’t remember exactly how long they lived, but I can remember visiting them as adult chickens each time we’d visit the grandparents.
I would never approve the gift of a live animal like that to a city child for Easter except under circumstances much like mine. While it is possible to have an in-the-house rabbit, you have to know how to train them to use a litter box and to interact with guests. A definite effort is required. I’ve visited friends with house rabbits who were great pets, but I’d want to make absolutely sure the family knew what they were getting in to before they took home a baby bunny.
We bought ourselves a baby duck at Easter last year. Still have her. She’s an indoor pet who actually earns her keep (egg-a-day). She and our black lab (dog, not my workshop) enjoy each other immensely although I’m not certain he understands why he finds her so fascinating. But yeah, quite a bit of work to keep up with a duck.
I knew there was a thread somewhere about this, and it turns out I started it.
Anyway, I wonder if the practice started as a way for hatcheries to make a little money from the male chicks, instead of sacrificing all of them?
I looked up this thread because over the weekend, I got some craft magazines from the 1960s and 1970s, and one from the spring of 1963 has an ad for “A Loving Easter Pet” with a drawing of a monkey in it. My first thought was that it was stuffed, but no, it was the real thing. :eek: I’m aware that pet monkeys were a fad for a while, and that’s how the infamous Jim Jones got away with selling them door-to-door as a fundraiser. According to the ad, for $20 you could get a 6-month-old monkey, guaranteed not to grow to more than 12 inches tall; it would “eat what you eat” and also included a cage.
Um, no.
I wonder how many of those monkeys quickly ended up dead, turned loose, and/or dumped at the animal shelter within a matter of days.