Bunny, come back! Girl’s mom says Tater stolen at Fort Worth Stock Show

A Weatherford kindergarten teacher said she won’t bring her daughter back to the Fort Worth Stock Show and Rodeo because the 11-year-old’s valuable bunny was stolen on the event’s last day.

Kynlee Winkleman was going to show off her blue Netherland Dwarf buck for the first time last Saturday when she arrived at a Stock Show barn and found him gone from the four-section coop he shared with three other bunnies.

They had last seen the bunny, Tater, at 8 p.m. the night before.

“Tater was removed from the cage — all they would have to do is raise the coop up,” mom Amber Winkleman said. “Our coop was close to the end of the building. It would be very easy for someone to snatch him.”

Fort Worth police officers took a theft report at the barn with poultry, pigeons and rabbits at 9 a.m. that day.

The coops, provided by the Stock Show, are placed atop plywood and have metal dividers to separate the rabbits. The doors are closed with a zip tie, which was still intact on Tater’s door, she said.

Someone would have had to lift the coop for the rabbit to get out, which Winkleman said may have happened because Tater, a house bunny, is friendly.

“It just stinks that my kid’s first experience off the bat was so tragic for her. I told her we are not going back next year if they don’t change the way they do things,” said Winkleman, who teaches at Crockett Elementary School in Weatherford.

“That is not just Kynlee’s show bunny, that is her baby,” her mom said, adding that Tater’s value is “endless” because he is a breeding buck.

Stock Show spokesman Matt Brockman said the coop system used for rabbits and poultry has been set up that way for a long time with “little to no or any problems.”

Winkleman said Stock Show employees were “absolutely not helpful” and simply watched her and her husband frantically comb the barn from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday.

“Knowing our staff the way I know them, they looked for the rabbit. They looked hard for the rabbit,” Brockman said. “They made announcements on our PA system.”

Other parents and children helped in the search, and one boy, Gavin Sexton, 15, of Brownsboro actually gave the family another rabbit.

Winkleman said she also reached out to the Southwestern Rabbit Breeders Association, which sanctioned the event, and was told Tater was probably in the barn somewhere and he’d turn up.

Brockman said event staff monitors the complex 24 hours a day, but it’s a “really big complex” and a “really small rabbit.” There are no cameras in the complex.

The entire complex is about 50 acres. The bunny at full size would weigh up to 2 1/2 pounds.

Brockman said that if the show organizers suggest changes for next year, they will listen.

He said the department superintendent is “truly broken up about about this problem,” and is still looking for Tater.

But Winkleman said no one is as broken up as her daughter.

“Momma do you think they have him inside? Do you think he is OK? Do you think they love him like I do?”

This story was originally published February 9, 2016 at 2:40 AM with the headline "Bunny, come back! Girl’s mom says Tater stolen at Fort Worth Stock Show."