The new scheme is intended to encourage families who have a garden to take a rabbit or chicken and raise it. This will help support Irish rabbit and poultry farmers and give families the chance to teach their kids responsibility and benefit either from fresh eggs or droppings to use for growing your veg.

Families who apply will need to have a garden space for their rabbit or chick to live safely in, so with a fenced in area or coop. They will be given detailed instructions on how to care for their baby animal and an initial bag of food to get their baby animal off to a good start.

The timing of the new scheme is perfect with Easter coming up, you could have your very own Easter Bunny or Chick running around!

Benefits to kids include:

• learning to be responsible for an animal
• calming anxieties through stroking something fluffy and soft
• posing for cute pics with cute animals

Benefits to parents include:

• an extra thing to remember to look after when the kids forget
• picking up droppings from your already wrecked garden
• heart in mouth moments when you realise you can’t see the damn animal anywhere in your garden

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The Baby Animal Adoption scheme, or “BAA” for short, is one of the Irish government’s latest projects launched to support Irish farmers and producers of chicken and rabbit.

Aoife McNamara, the government’s champion for the project said, “This new scheme is a particular favourite of mine. Nobody can resist a cute chick or a cute bunny, and it’s a sneaky way of getting these animals distributed across the country”.

To claim your free baby chicken or rabbit, just head over to the Irish government website www.gov.ie/freechick, fill out your contact details and someone will be in touch with where to pick your chick or bunny up.