Gowanus Bunny Hoarder Sentenced To 45 Days In Jail, 5 Years Without Bunnies

GOWANUS, BROOKLYN — After a dramatic, two-year court battle, Brooklyn's most notorious bunny hoarder, 36-year-old Polish immigrant and local music teacher Dorota Trec, was handed her final sentence Friday: 45 days in jail, three years of probation and — perhaps worst of all — a five-year moratorium on possessing bunnies. (Or any other animals, for that matter).

Judge Curtis Farber also mandated that Trec pay $23,569.32 to the nonprofit that took in her brood; that she add her name to the city's Animal Abusers Registry; and that she see a mental health professional.

NYPD officers and animal rescue workers famously raided Trec's outdoor bunny colony behind Gowanus' Mexico Tire Shop at 466 3rd Ave. in January 2015, at the onset of an incoming blizzard that authorities feared would harm the animals.

According to the Times, vets who examined the 180 or so bunnies found that more than two-thirds of them had "wounds, mostly from bites"; around half had contracted syphilis; nearly three dozen were showing signs of "genital or anal trauma"; and others were suffering from "abscesses and skin inflammations associated with being kept in unclean environments."

"Dorota Trec will be spending the night in Rikers!!!" bunny activist Natalie Reeves, moderator of the Big Apple Bunnies Facebook page and leader of the local crusade against Trec, wrote to her followers Friday.

The jail sentence "is far too little time for the suffering she caused, but because I was afraid this judge might let her off entirely, I realize it could have been worse," Reeves wrote.

Judy Dronzek, one of the page's followers, added: "Amazing job to everyone who cared enough about these animals to help create the case, capture, care for the sick bunnies or be involved with the case. At least we [stopped] some suffering and alerted NY that rabbits matter too!"

At Trec's conviction in November, the jury read off each "guilty" verdict, one by one, 100 times — one time for each animal the jury believed had suffered while living behind the tire shop.

Trec has maintained throughout the entire ordeal, though, that the bunnies in her hoard — which she replaced with dozens more during her trial, then replaced again and again after additional police raids — were wild, strong, happy and free, and that any duress they suffered was at the hands of their supposed rescuers.

Years after the raid, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) is still trying to adopt out members of Trec's bunny colony, along with roughly 100 offspring.

Meanwhile, the bunny hoarder herself is still trying to counter-sue a long list of prosecutors, police, nonprofits and activists for $2.8 billion. She has called the neighborhood campaign against her a "witch hunt."

"I’m a rabbit girl," Trec told the Guardian in a recent interview. "I will have rabbits forever."

Pictured at top: Jasper — or one of his parents, hard to say — was rescued from Trec's squalid Gowanus bunny habitat in January 2015, according to the ASPCA.