Carroll College students help manage Helena’s long-running feral rabbit colony

Roughly 100 feral rabbits have spent nearly a decade on Rodney Street in Helena, chewing through landscaping, gardens and other property until Carroll College students stepped in to help manage the colony.

What looks like a harmless backyard problem has become a real neighborhood quality-of-life issue. The rabbits are part of a wider Montana pattern, abandoned pets that survive outdoors, breed and turn into colonies that homeowners and neighborhoods cannot handle alone.

Carroll College’s anthropology and anthrozoology students joined the response, bringing classroom training and hands-on animal work to a problem playing out in plain sight near the neighborhood. The college’s anthrozoology program focuses on human-animal relationships, and the rabbit project gave students a chance to apply that study to a local case with visible stakes for nearby residents.

On April 13, organizers said the goal was to safely capture the rabbits, spay or neuter them, vaccinate them and relocate them. They estimated about 75 rabbits for that effort, a figure that falls close to the broader count of roughly 100 animals tied to the colony. Together, those numbers show how entrenched the problem has become and why a quick cleanup was never likely to be enough.

For Helena, the project reaches beyond one block of Rodney Street. It points to the strain long-running nuisance issues place on property upkeep, neighborhood appearance and animal welfare at the same time. It also shows how a local college can become part of the solution, using students to help address a problem that has lingered for years and to test whether a coordinated response can offer a model for other Helena neighborhoods facing the same kind of rabbit overflow.