INWOOD — Hare today, gone tomorrow?
Police told a used car dealer who has been keeping two pet rabbits at his Inwood lot that the furry friends must find a new home.
Charlie Nuñez, 44, brought the bunnies to the used car lot he manages at Broadway and West 216th Street about eight months ago, after his wife got tired of the mess they were making in the family’s apartment.
“When they was in my house, they don’t have nowhere to go because we have a little cage,” said Nuñez, a native of the Dominican Republic who still keeps rabbits as pets on property he has there. “Now when they come here, they getting beautiful and they getting strong and fat.”
The car lot, which sits beneath the tracks of the elevated 1 train, may seem like a less than idyllic setting for the pets, but Nuñez said the animals are happy.
He allows the rabbits — one black and one brown — to roam freely around the lot during the day, and they take shelter underneath an RV that serves as an office at the site.
Some locals expressed concerns after spotting the rabbits on nearby sidewalks and street gutters, and one resident even reported seeing them at the gas station across the street from the car lot. There is a fence surrounding the car lot, but the rabbits have squeezed underneath it and hopped away in the past.
After people made Nuñez aware of this, he said he planned to build a fence around the RV so that the rabbits could be contained when no one was around to watch them.
“I’ve been worried about it if they go outside in the nighttime and somebody stole it or somebody hit it,” Nuñez said. “That’s my big, main thing.”
He said that police visited the car lot over the weekend to check on the rabbits while another employee, Edward Garcia, was there.
At first the officers said they could keep the rabbits at the lot if an appropriate cage was installed, Garcia said. However, by the end of the visit, police had a different message.
“They said they were going to take the rabbits if they were here next time,” Garcia said. “I don’t know why.”
He added that the officers had been told that the rabbits were being fed Styrofoam, which he insisted was not true.
The NYPD did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A spokeswoman for the ASPCA, which assists police with such cases, said the organization is currently looking into the situation and cannot comment at this time.
Nuñez explained that he feeds them rabbit food and lettuce every day, as well as allowing them to munch on leftover rice and beans.
While the rabbits have been to the vet twice, he noted, neither animal has been spayed or neutered and the brown rabbit is now pregnant.
Nuñez said he is very concerned about the police taking the rabbits because they could end up in a city shelter, which may euthanize animals that aren’t adopted after a certain waiting period.
“The thing is, they’re going to kill them and they’re not bothering nobody,” he said.
Earlier this year, police seized dozens of bunnies from a lot in Gowanus in advance of a blizzard that was scheduled to hit the city. Authorities hauled even more of them away after finding some of the rabbits had syphilis.
Nuñez is now trying to convince his friend who has a house in Nanuet, N.Y., to adopt the bunnies. He was at the lot on Monday to take a closer look at the rabbits.
“I have a big house and a big yard,” said the friend, Freddy Ramos. “But I also have a cat and I’m afraid it won’t like it.”
Ramos, who works in an office across the street from the used car lot and knew Nuñez was keeping rabbits there, was surprised to hear that police had intervened.
“He’s not mistreating them or doing anything bad to them,” Ramos said. “He loves them too much.”
Nuñez has grown attached to the bunnies, he said recently as he watched them snuggle in a patch of sunlight.
“Animals never give you a problem. Never,” he said. “They are different than us. They don’t fight. These two are always together. One to the other, give each other love. Beautiful.”
