This all started with a 3-legged rescue rabbit called Hop-Along Cassidy (named by the kind people at the rescue centre who gave her a chance) who was full of spirit and fire.
She was brought into the centre as a baby with one of her rear legs crushed so badly that the centre had no choice but to amputate it.
At the rescue centre she had an entire enclosure to herself that was full of hay bales, and she would happily clamber and climb across this uneven landscape. She needed a home ...
We needed a partner for our house rabbit and had no hesitation in taking on the responsibility of looking after Cassie. Her disability was no barrier: she would jump on the sofa and climb up bookcases, and taught our original bunny how to properly get into trouble.
But Cassie needed special support to clean herself and would lean up against things in order to reach her legs and back without falling over. We hunted for a better solution and didn't find one.
So we decided to make a bed that would help her out.
That original bed worked amazingly well, and we soon thought of another design, which also worked really well. We made new designs and refined the original designs and noticed that no-one was specifically making beds for pet rabbits.
We started to donate these beds to bunny rescues that caught our eye and everyone said how great they were.
Inspired by Cassie, and driven by the widespread neglect of pet rabbits, we got more involved in the world of animal rescue and started our own rescue and sanctuary. We would take in unwanted rabbits from people who could no longer look after them, get the bunny back to full health, vaccinated, neutered, and find them a good new home.
This was not a cheap process but it was done with love and over the years we have helped many hundreds of rabbits find their new forever homes all over the country.
To help offset the costs we started selling our beds online and they proved wildly popular. We could not keep up with the demand while working full-time and tending to between 10-30 rabbits at a time. Some customers told us how their cats were stealing the rabbit beds, so they ordered another one just for the cat!
Life circumstances changed and that meant more time could be given to making beds, but that was still just one person doing the making and even with the extra time the demand was too much.
It was at this point that we decided to create the Pet Hugger and work with a friendly supplier who could produce the bed to our exacting design and specification.
We are pleased that we can finally bring this amazing bed to an audience who may never have seen this design before.
But I've seen this design of bed before?
Yes, you probably have! We created this design in 2011 and started to sell hand-made versions online in 2012. At that time ours was the only store that sold beds for house rabbits. How much the world has changed since then! We are pleased that the needs of house-rabbits has moved on so much and there are so many choices, unlike when we started. The bed design became so popular that imitators and copiers slowly appeared, and some of them have been very successful and created a viable business using our original design.
After a decade of making these beds by hand we have finally found a way to bring them to a wider audience while still preserving the special character that makes this bed the original and best!