Rabbit Rehab

I’ve owned one rabbit before the current bunny saga. His name was Remington, and he was a noble rabbit. Without him, I never would have developed my love for the lapin. Growing up a farmer’s daughter, rabbits were our mortal enemies. We shot and sometimes ate them. I wondered why people would have them as pets when they could have dogs or cats. I mean, it’s not like they even do anything. They don’t make noises. They don’t wag their tails. Why not have a fish really? Remington’s rambunctious nature changed all that. His favourite food was tomato sauce.

Now we have two rabbits: Wellesley and Newton, father and son. The mother left (oh Elliot, where are you now?) and Wellesley raised a little tribe of bunnies single pawedly. He did a pretty good job too. We gave away the other bunnies, and kept Newton as a companion rabbit even though I know you aren’t supposed to have two boys together…. So far they had gotten along very well. They slept together all cuddled up in a cute rabbity ball.

After a while of great father son happy times, it became apparent that Newton needed neutering. He started humping his dad. Animals don’t care so much about the familial relationships they share with who they hump, rabbits especially. Wellesley tried to hump my elbow once. Anyway, initially Newton’s humping seemed ok. Wellesley would just run away. At that point I couldn’t afford to neuter Newton. Rabbit neutering is not cheap. It’s around $125 - $160 (we neutered Wellesley after he became a dad). After a while it became apparent that it was causing Wellesley some serious stress, so Murray helped me out and we got Newton neutered.

Rabbits don’t always recover well from surgery. They have to be separated from other rabbits for almost two weeks. The reintroduction didn’t go so well after the two week break. Wellesley had gotten used to the freedom of not being humped, and Newton had residual hormones and was rabbit wild horny. So Newton chased Wellesley, and Wellesley was terrified of Newton. We tried to make them live together, but it was just too cruel (Wellesley had even escaped a few times) so we separated them.

We have tried on multiple occasions to get them back together, particularly because for a while there we had one rabbit in the house (Wellesley) and one rabbit outside (Newton). We tried getting them back together in different environs. We tried the bathroom (too small), the outside hutch (Wellesley was too good at escaping), the bedroom (most epic rabbit battle of all time, mid air flying rabbit kick collisions). Murray didn’t like living with a rabbit in the bathroom. I promised we’d get them both outside, but it was hard because I broke my ankle and couldn’t even get into the rabbit enclosure. In the end, we rangied up a divider on the inside of our enclosure – converted an old washing basket into a second rabbit house, and wa la! We had a rabbit shanty town.

The fence in the middle was mesh. We wanted them to be able to see each other so they could get used to each other again. It was a very simple plan. We did have to make some adjustments to the initial design - Newton dug under the first separating fence and Wellesley escaped again. Murray did the hard yards (my ankle was still moon booted) and dug under the entire enclosure and put mesh down as recommended by Ngaio’s boyfriend Nick, who used to build zoo enclosures. This worked well. We had both bunnies outside, contained in their respective sides of rabbit shanty town. We’ve only had one rabbit escape since then, and that’s because the lawnmower man cut a hole in the mesh with his lawn edger (nice one!)

In the last few weeks I started noticing the bunnies sniffing each other through the fence. Then the other day I noticed them laying out in the sun next to each other. After having a serious clean out of Wellesley’s side, and terrifying the rabbits by giving them each a bit of a brush, we thought we’d try putting them together again.

We hoped Wellesley’s preoccupation with changes to his surroundings might distract him (he likes his grass just so). And Newton was stressed because we’d just terrorised him with a brush, so we thought he’d be less likely to dominate Wellesley. So we put Newton over the fence into Wellesley’s side. There was silence, no stomping. This was the first time this had happened. Both rabbits start stomping to signify danger whenever they even THINK the other rabbit is around. Newton and Wellesley were both so preoccupied with the ‘new’ space, that they didn’t pay much attention to each other at all. I watched them for a full hour, ready to intervene at the hint of any rabbit shenanigans but there were none. I left them to it for a bit. When Wellesley is really distressed he tries to jump up into my arms. I went out and put my arms out to him, he didn’t even look at me. We left them alone together for the night. When I woke up around 6am I peeked out the window and they were snuggled up together on top of the hutch.

At the moment, we haven’t taken down the middle fence. We are giving it time so that Newton’s space can become more neutral before we reintroduce them to it. There have definitely been a couple of dominance kerfuffles, but nothing major and both rabbits seem happy. Newton has started doing his head twitch jumpy move that we haven’t seen him do in ages. And Wellesley is back to playing dad, and cleaning his son. We are so happy to have finally facilitated this successful rabbit rehab.