The organisers and partners of Rabbit Awareness Week (RAW), the UK’s largest welfare campaign for rabbits, are excited to announce that this year’s RAW campaign will look rather different in the light of the recent pandemic. This year, all the fun will be hosted online as a festival of live videos, content sharing and activities from 10-23 August, a longer period than usual.
RAW 2020 aims to reach, educate and inform more rabbit owners than ever before about the five key welfare needs of rabbits and will encourage them to join in the conversation online.
As always, RAW will bring together leading rabbit welfare experts and veterinary professionals from across the UK as they join forces with welfare charities and organisations who work tirelessly to help improve standards of rabbit care.
In previous years, these individuals and organisations have hosted physical events at their premises, which is obviously significantly more challenging this year. As a result, the RAW team is currently collating a packed programme of digital workshops, live Q&As, virtual tours and educational videos, as well as a huge range of content, which will be shared online.
Rabbit owners, animal lovers and anyone else interested in learning more about rabbit welfare will be able to take part in all of the fun for free throughout Rabbit Awareness Week through the official website and social media pages, as well as the social media pages of the RAW partner organisations.
Holly Ackroyd, Senior Brand Manager at Burgess Pet Care, who organises RAW, said:
“Vets have always played an active, and absolutely vital, part of Rabbit Awareness Week but the Coronavirus pandemic means we’ve had to get a bit more creative to make sure we can drive and facilitate their involvement with this year’s campaign. We’re delighted that the RAW partners and our supporting vets will once again be lending their support to the campaign by delivering online content that promises to both entertain and educate UK owners, and ‘would-be’ owners of these amazing animals.
“Despite the current challenges, we’re confident this year’s campaign will build on previous years to be our biggest RAW campaign yet. As one of the UK’s most misunderstood pets, it’s so important that we continue to raise awareness about the welfare needs of rabbits. We’ve invested significantly into the creation of new content and collateral on all of these needs and have extended the length of the campaign to ensure that we comprehensively shine a light on them all.”
This new collateral includes the RAW Better Bunnies Programme, a daily checklist that encourages rabbit owners to maintain regular daily interaction with their rabbits, as well as ensuring they’re providing the right diets and performing regular health checks.
Dr Richard Saunders, Specialist Veterinary Advisor at the Rabbit Welfare Association & Fund said:
“Rabbits are officially one of our most misunderstood pets so going ahead with RAW was more important than ever in this crisis. We are delighted to see Burgess, as our organisers, diversifying a well-established national campaign to devise an innovative, creative, digital programme of activity, which will do a great job of addressing the key issues.”
Thousands of veterinary practices, rescue centres and pet retailers take part in RAW every year and are urged to do their bit for rabbit welfare by hosting their own digital events online. Guides are currently being created by the RAW team to support vets, rescue centres and pet retailers through the process of running a successful digital event.
A full timeline of activity for this year’s RAW campaign, as well as updated marketing collateral, will be available to download in the coming weeks from the RAW website.