Sisters rescue two rabbits from icy water

Sadly, neither animal survives

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When Chelsea Barrios saw a baby rabbit fall into a lake on a cold day last week, she went in after it.

Barrios, 29, and her 22-year-old sister, Taylor Euliano, residents of Oceanside, have a knack for finding and rescuing sick or abandoned animals. “I found a possum that was stuck on the Rockville Centre LIRR,” Barrios said. “Somehow the animals find us, and everyone knows that about us.”

So when Euliano saw two four — or five-month-old black rabbits near the water at Silver Lake Park in Baldwin on April 4, she grabbed one and brought it to their friends, animal rehabilitators Bobby and Cathy Horvath of Massapequa. The Horvaths run a nonprofit called Wildlife In Need Of Rescue and Rehabilitation.

Barrios went to the lake on her lunch break from her job at a Rockville Centre orthodontist, looking for the other rabbit, and spotted it. “I was standing there with Bobby and Cathy on the phone,” she said. “I didn’t go near the rabbit.”

Then she saw the animal fall into the cold pond, and called 911. She took off her jacket and shoes and, keeping the 911 dispatcher on the phone — with 1 percent left on her battery — stepped off a ledge into a canal where the water was 4 feet deep. Even though the dispatcher had told her to not do that. The animal would not have survived, Barrios said, if she had waited for emergency services to arrive.

She found the rabbit tangled in branches and weeds, but could not get out of the water, because as the ledge was too high for her to reach and the water was dragging her down. “I’m short and the water was up to my chest,” Barrios, who is 5 feet 1, recounted. “I put [the rabbit] against my chest and tried to rub him and keep him warm.”

She was in the frigid water for 15 minutes before police and an ambulance crew found her and pulled her out by her arms. She was freezing and soaked. “They wanted to take me to the hospital,” she said. “But I drove home and warmed the bunny up.” (Barrios said that her boss wasn’t mad that she was late getting back to work. “He knows about my rescues,” she said.)

The Horvaths prescribed medicine for the rabbit, which was in shock, dehydrated and had taken in a lot of water. “He was eating that night,” Barrios said. “Unfortunately, in the morning he had passed away.”

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