Child Designs Wheelchair for Bunny

Energy & Sustainability
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The All Terrain Bunny, or ATB for short, is a wheelchair for a paraplegic baby rabbit designed by young Liam O’Rourke in Tucson, AZ. Good going!

When the O’Rourke family of Tucson found a couple of Easter-time bunnies in their back yard, they knew right away that something wasn’t quite right.

There was a reason the mother rabbit abandoned them. Paul O’Rourke realized one bunny they named Joe had no use of his hind legs. Paul and his family helped nurse the bunnies back to health, but then they went one step further to help the paraplegic bunny.

Paul’s son Liam designed and built a small cart for Joe to help him move around a little easier. The red wagon with yellow wheels took some getting used to, but ultimately seemed to improve his mobility.

After Joe and his brother were feeling a bit better, the O’Rourke family took them to a wildlife rescue center.

[Thanks, Lish!]

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16 thoughts on “Child Designs Wheelchair for Bunny

  1. Russell Allen says:

    This happened to a dwarf bunny I had years ago. My autistic son picked him up by his ears, and he kicked out to free himself. Unbelievably, bunnies can kick hard enough to break their own backs. Ours lived for almost a year, pathetically dragging himself around the house before complications got him. Still makes me sad…

    1. Garrett Mace says:

      Every part of that story made me sad.

  2. Engineer Zero says:

    Small animals, especially wild rodents, can be terrified of human contact to the point of literally dying of fright. Be sure to treat them gently and give them time to get accustomed. If you try to see things from their point of view, you’ll be amazed at how courageous and trusting such supposedly timid animals actually are.

    1. Shawn Blaszak says:

      I once had a pet bunny that got attacked by a wild animal (we didn’t want to keep him cooped up on a cage so we’d let him run around on the fenced in back porch. Unfortunately, it wasn’t roofed in and we think either a squirrel or raccoon tried to steal his food or something). He survived the attack and we took him to a vet who disinfected the cuts and gave him a sedative. As soon as the sedative wore off, he died of a heart attack.

      On the flip side, we used to have wild bunnies in our yard all the time when I was a kid. They would spend their entire lives growing up in the area and would get used to us being around. Since we never did anything aggressive towards them, they would get used to us and we could walk within a few arms lengths before they would even bother hopping away slowly, even after they had grown up. Since the bunnies the OP found were newborns, their brains should still be developing. This should allow them to get over the shock of being handled by humans.

  3. Matthew Roy says:

    Not to be too gross… But where does it go to the bathroom?

    1. Anonymous says:

      In the little Bunnies room!

  4. elijah says:

    How do you prevent yr rabbit from getting urine burn and bed sore? My rabbit had a broken back.

    1. Dio says:

      the same thing happen to my rabbit some months ago and now to deal with this sitution i started to take him to (pipi) every 5-6 hours or more.(it depents how much water he drinks).
      I take him above the toilet s**t and with my right hand i hold him under his chest and with my left hand i squeeze his belly until he pies everything,after i wheep him with some paper and he is clean,vet told me that in these areas that it gets sore and red you can put some Betadine.Hope i helped you…
      You can have a look if you want…

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Becky Stern is a Content Creator at Autodesk/Instructables, and part time faculty at New York’s School of Visual Arts Products of Design grad program. Making and sharing are her two biggest passions, and she's created hundreds of free online DIY tutorials and videos, mostly about technology and its intersection with crafts. Find her @bekathwia on YouTube/Twitter/Instagram.

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