Original subtitles

What you're about to see may be dangerous,

illegal, unethical, petty, misguided, immoral,

and most definitely stupid.

But it's also all true.

Sort of.

We went to the community.

We'd go early in the morning, around, like, 6:30.

Hi.

Some residents are very hostile.

One lady, she was approaching us and she was carrying a gun.

She was screaming, "Get off of my property!"

Get off my property!

She said, "If you come here, I'll shoot you."

I will shoot you!

My volunteers, they were afraid.

They were fearing for their lives there.

We're just gonna get our things, and we're gonna get out of your hair.

We're just gonna grab these.

There was one resident, opened the car

and they have a machine gun.

He said, "I don't want you guys taking the bunnies!"

I don't want you guys taking those bunnies!

He said, "Those bunnies are mine."

Those bunnies are mine!

So, this is Jenada Isle.

It's an island, so there's only one entrance in and out.

This is a great neighborhood.

There's 81 homes and everybody knows everybody.

I'm Alicia Griggs and I live in Jenada Isle in Wilton Manors

and I've lived in the neighborhood for 39 years,

since 1984.

This is the house where the woman lived that left the rabbits in the street.

A couple of years ago, one of the neighbors had a lot of rabbits.

Hi.

She wasn't a very responsible pet owner.

I'm not a very responsible pet owner.

I'm an absolute sociopath.

When she moved, she just left all the extra rabbits

in the street to fend for themselves.

I'm leaving you to fend for yourself.

And they've multiplied because they weren't fixed,

and they just continued to multiply.

They were first spotted a couple years back

when one neighbor left them behind.

I think she had three rabbits and she let them out.

Three months ago, we had 110 rabbits all over the place.

They can reproduce every 30 days

and they can have one to 12 bunnies every single time.

I just was pushing constantly

to try and get the rabbits to be rescued and rehomed.

And I was calling everybody,

trying to see if anybody could help do it.

And nobody would do it, so I called this person, Kim.

She is a wealthy socialite

that has a sanctuary for rabbits.

Welcome to my home.

It is Marion Sims Wyeth, the architect of Mar-a-Lago.

My name is Kim Renk.

I am a proud animal rescue person.

There have been times when all eight bedrooms

and nine bathrooms of this house

have been filled with bunnies that I've rescued.

She knows a lot of wealthy people,

and she likes to be the center of attention,

has a lot of contacts, so she can get things done.

Since the time I can remember thinking,

I have been obsessed with rabbits.

Literally, since I was three years old, I think my first thoughts were rabbits.

You're precious. You're precious.

I love grass, too.

We can smell the grass together.

Come on, babies. Come on, bunny.

Banana treat. Banana.

Banana treat.

Rabbits wake up at about four o'clock

and they're nocturnal, so this is their sleepy time.

This is the time that they lounge on the veranda

and enjoy life in Palm Beach.

There's two more here somewhere.

Um, this is the master.

Well, welcome.

You can see Wolfman Jack and Shorty

lounging on the bed in the lap of luxury.

Wherever they want.

My husband's rabbit sleeps in bed with us every single night.

And I wish my husband would be here,

but he sadly is in the investment world

and didn't think this would bode well for him

because his little rabbit Shorty

sleeps in bed with him every night.

So, one day, Alicia called me,

and she explained

the horrible situation going on here.

I immediately jumped into action.

So, I dialed Monica. I thought she could help.

Hey, Honey Bunny. This is Honey-- Okay, Honey Bunny.

This is Honey Bunny.

My name is Monica Mitchell.

My rescue, East Coast Rabbit Rescue.

There's only few rabbit rescues, and there are so many needs.

At one point, I had over a hundred bunnies at once.

This is Bun-New York City room,

and I call this the Bun-hattan.

You have the Bunstro, the Bun Statue.

I always put the B-U-N, like "bunny,"

like the Bunklyn-- Bunklyn Bridge,

'cause you go from Manhattan to Bunklyn,

like Brooklyn, but Bunklyn, yeah.

This is my own rescue.

I started working with rabbits back in 2012.

My pocket.

Most of the, you know,

the funding comes from my savings.

You know, I sold everything I had back in Brazil

and kind of started to the rescue.

Monica said she didn't have enough money,

and I said, "I can get the money."

I can get the money. "Show me the money."

Tom Cruise in whatever that movie was

where he's dancing in his underwear in front of the fireplace.

"Show me the money." Let's get the money.

So, of course, the first thing I thought of was,

"How do you get the money?"

You have some sort of an outreach.

My publicist, Lisa Bitner, said, "I'll get the Associated Press."

I'm Terry Spencer.

I'm the Broward-Palm Beach correspondent for the Associated Press.

I got a call from a publicist, and she said that

there was this rabbit infestation in a neighborhood.

So I started checking it out,

and it turned out to be a pretty good story.

It went viral.

Poof! Like a match to some dried newspapers.

Dozens of bunnies are taking over a neighborhood in Wilton Manors.

These rabbits are overrunning everything,

and now a group is trying to rescue them rather than exterminate them.

Everywhere you went, you heard the story.

And the money just kept coming in,

and I'm not saying it's enough,

but it was enough to get them to go out and help the animals.

There were these rescue groups

that said, "Okay, we'll come in."

Okay. We'll come in.

"And we'll get the rabbits."

And we'll get the rabbits.

But sadly, to every good side of a story, there's the yin and yang.

You've been talking to residents. What are they telling you, Julia?

Mixed emotions over this, certainly, Sheli.

There were some people who got quite angry.

They thought that the rabbits were going to be killed.

They didn't want the rabbits to go away.

And so it became very much a divide.

When the rescue teams came out,

it was complete turmoil on the island.

It seemed like a free-for-all.

There was really no organization.

All of a sudden, there would be one group.

Then there's another group.

They were running all over each other's properties.

People that came acted like vigilantes.

They came onto the property and started hitting stuff

and trampling things, and breaking stuff.

"Oh, there's bunny babies in here."

There are bunny babies in here!

It was a nightmare.

I've never seen anything like it in my life.

And I've traveled the world extensively

on business and otherwise.

Oh, là, là, chérie.

Not everyone is glad to see them go.

They're an asset.

They're lovely. They make everybody smile.

Joe Jones said he wants the bunnies

in his yard to stick around.

I found one two and a half years ago in my pool

and saved the little thing, and sort of got hooked on 'em.

My name is Joe Jones.

I've lived on this island in this house for 33 years.

Let's see, how do you do that?

We respect each other's privacy out here, and I like that.

Except that woman,

that troublemaker up there, she caused a lot of problems.

Joseph Jones got a really big house.

He doesn't use all the rooms,

so he can take the rabbits in if he wanted to,

but he just likes to keep them in the yard

because he thinks they're delightful.

They're delightful. The children love to see them.

I'm not worried about their health in the least

because I've never seen any health issues.

No fleas, no ticks, no malnutrition.

They seem extremely healthy and well rested.

Most of the residents, they said the bunnies are fine.

But just because you see a bunny hopping around

doesn't mean that he's healthy.

These rabbits are like little miniature poodles.

They have personalities.

They're called lionhead rabbits.

They're small and furry,

and they were bred to be extremely domestic

and extremely friendly to humans.

They are pet rabbits

that have no clue what they're doing outside.

They don't know not to cross the street.

They get hit by cars. They get hit by golf carts.

All of their fear has been bred out of them.

They're sitting ducks for dogs that get let loose off leash,

or hawks, eagles, other hungry birds that come down and grab them.

We rescued 44 bunnies from that community.

Every single one, they had medical issues.

Mange, ear mites, fleas.

They're supposed to be eating hay all day

or else their teeth continue to grow and they can't even eat.

If the bunny doesn't eat in six to eight hours, they die.

If they are not brushed regularly,

they start to have their hair ball.

They die.

Ultimately, what happened, right,

is it's blowing up. It's literally, again,

we have residents that are threatening other residents.

So we threw a town hall.

Hey, good evening. Gary Blocker,

chief of your Wilton Manors Police Department.

Uh, yesterday, you were provided a,

hopefully, an extensive menu-- not a menu, uh, memo.

Rabbit stew, rabbit steak.

They all laughed about it. The rabbits were on the menu.

Like he joked about eating them.

Hopefully, you've had an opportunity to digest that.

We're really looking here to...

You know, keep in mind that if the trappers do trap the rabbits,

and they have no place to put them,

that they're going to be euthanized.

I don't know what the answer is besides that, though.

Right.

I watched the commission meeting and it said that they would be euthanized.

The best word is a British word called "gobsmacked."

I was gobsmacked.

The town was going to euthanize them in a really inhumane way.

The thought that somebody would inject antifreeze to kill them

was unthinkable to me.

Chris Caputo, I think, is the commissioner,

he expressed a desire

for a mass extermination before the problem got out of hand.

This isn't Germany.

I became a villain because there's this belief

that there was bunny genocides in place.

But some sound bites get a little bit out of hand, right?

And then everyone just makes an assumption

about what's happening without asking for any facts.

It didn't look so good that he was in favor

of euthanizing all these rabbits.

And Chris Caputo suddenly, poof, had a change of heart.

So the city was allowed

to spend up to 30,000 dollars to get rid of the problem.

Isn't that interesting?

So I pushed the city to use Monica

so that we could get something going to rescue the bunnies.

Those bunnies are mine!

Just get the fuck out of here!

Get out of here! Get the fuck out of here!

My volunteers, they don't want to stay there.

Go, go, go, go!

We had some residents taking pictures

of our license plates and of our faces.

You gotta drive!

I think the residents thought that we were the exterminators,

not that we were the rescuers.

I would like to say, are you kidding me?

Shame on me. I stood back for two months,

thinking other people were going to solve it.

But they didn't.

So I came here to do a rescue.

I realized this was a scary place,

a dangerous place.

I call it the Twilight Zone.

Have you ever seen The Twilight Zone?

It's an old series, but a really phenomenal series.

Many of the people approached me

and they did not want anyone in their neighborhood,

even though they're public streets.

I was not prepared for the anger of the residents.

Stop!

It was a very scary atmosphere.

It was nighttime.

I was in my Jeep, following the vigilante groups.

Stop.

A lady came to my Jeep

and banged on my driver's window.

She screamed profanities.

I am screaming profanities.

She was crazy and she was drunk and she was terrible.

I am crazy, I am drunk, and I'm terrible.

She said, "Get your pit bull out of your backseat."

And I said, "That's not a pit bull, that's a neighbor."

I had a truckload

full of middle-aged men that looked like giant potatoes

that approached and said, "Where do you live?"

Where do you live?

That's always the question you get when you go to Wilton Manors.

It should be a T-shirt.

"Where do you live?" Question mark.

Where do you live? Where do you live?

Where do you live?

- Where do you live? - Where do you live?

Somebody asked her if she lived in the neighborhood

and she said no,

she lives in a 20-million-dollar house in Palm Beach.

She was leaning on the person's car.

And I think he might have told her to get off the car

or pushed her or something.

And my life was threatened, and I called the police.

So she called the police and tried to make a report,

but they didn't show up for 45 minutes, so she got upset.

Took them quite a while to arrive, to be quite honest.

This can't go on here.

It can't go on that there's fear.

Fear has to be eradicated in this life.

There's no reason that residents who live here

are in fear of helping the rabbits.

Alicia Griggs is in fear.

That's why she's in her house right now.

She's afraid of her neighbors. I don't blame her.

My life was threatened on these very streets.

We live in the United States of America,

and we're on public property on the street,

and all I can say is no one should live in fear.

It's wrong. It's wrong.

It's wrong.

There was a follow-up meeting on Zoom,

and it was supposed to be for the neighbors

who wanted to keep the bunnies around in their yards.

All right, good evening, Wilton Manors community. Jenada Isle.

Thank everybody for being here tonight.

Nobody really showed up, so it was a waste of time.

Right now, we do have about five attendees.

Yes, is it a little disappointing

we didn't get more than five?

Yes, I'll be very candid with you.

Gary Blocker, again, he's just a puppet of the organization,

but he sent an email stating that nothing else was happening.

And he said in that email that he

"hoped the rabbits that were remaining wouldn't procreate."

How could no one do nothing?

And I know that it's improper grammar,

but it applies in this situation.

That was the last thing that we heard from the Jenada.

We could not reach our goal, you know?

I threw the football to them. They didn't do the job.

Now we have to do more.

For what reason God has called me to help,

I don't know.

But I'm asking him to call somebody else next time.

If nothing's done, the problem will continue,

and the population will be

bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.

It's history. Turn the page.

Close the chapter.

That the whole situation is, in my opinion, taken care of.

But I will continue to do whatever I can to make it right,

to save all those rabbits, to make a difference,

to have the story be told

across the United States of America.

Please, let justice be served.

We're going tonight. And we're gonna get some of those rabbits.

I have my professional trapper with no teeth.

I hope he won't feel offended when I say that.

But he's amazing.

And we're gonna get more rabbits.

And we're gonna solve it.

Did you guys want a drink?

Or anything?

Waters, like there's vodka.

I am not crazy, I am not drunk, and I'm not terrible.