Imagine answering the phone to an owner who is in tears. Their two dogs have fought in the house and the injuries are terrible. You advise them to bring the dogs in as quickly as they can, but when they arrive, you, it's obvious that the injuries are too severe to be surgically repaired.
Surprised and shocked, you explained that euthanasia is the only option. Now imagine finding out that this happened so regularly that 40% of owners had needed to separate their dogs to prevent it. You might wonder why nobody was talking about it.
So while a pair of dogs or a pair of cats in the same household may occasionally fight, in the real world it's very, very rare for these fights to cause life limiting injuries. Unfortunately, the same can't be said of rabbits. They find themselves with an unfortunate catch-22.
Isolation can be devastating for their welfare, but poorly formed bonds or relationships can result in severe injury or death. That's why I'm talking to you today. So in this webinar, I'm not gonna give you a how-to guide to bonding rabbits.
That is covered really well elsewhere. But I want to help you understand how to help owners who approach you for help with their rabbits' relationships. So I'm gonna start by talking about what social relationships rabbits require.
What influences bonding success, what influences bond breakdown, how rabbits normally interact. And then I'm gonna finish by talking about what you can advise and do to create and maintain stable rabbit relationships. So let's start with the key message of this webinar.
Male female bonds seem to be easiest to form and least likely to break down. Male female bonded pairs are less likely to need rehoming. Male, male bonds are the least likely to work of all of the combinations, and these bonds often break down at puberty.
And groups appear to be more stable than either of the single sex pair bonds. So To improve the likelihood of stable relationships, set the bond up for success at the beginning, and try to reduce bond disruptions as much as possible. So a lot of this talk, a lot of the data that I'm gonna show today is based on a study I did a few years ago for the Rabbit Welfare Association and fund.
Despite rabbit bonding being a very, very common procedure, and the benefits of keeping rabbits socially is a very well known, there's not actually very much research on this topic. There's some information from the laboratory rabbit world concerning social interactions and factors affecting conflict. But these rabbits are often a very specific breed in a very specific environment, often with other stresses as well.
So actually these situations often have very limited applicability to the situations with pet rabbits that owners are likely to encounter. There's also observational data on numbers of rabbits kept with other rabbits. So things like the PDSA Animal well-being report.
And there's also data on behavioural problems in single rabbits versus group house rabbits. But there's very little on which bonds are easiest to form, which bonds break down most readily, and what owners can do to to bond, what owners actually do to bond their rabbits. And so for this reason, The Rabbit Welfare Association and Fund asked me to run a survey of owners, veterinary surgeons, and rescue centres to find out what I could about this topic.
So, in February and March 2020, just before the pandemic really hit, we sent out three online questionnaires via SurveyMonkey. And these were distributed through the Rabbit Welfare Association and funds online mailing lists. Now, people are really, really happy to share data on their rabbits.
So we received over 1200 unique owner responses, 82 responses from veterinary professionals, and 22 responses from rescue centres. So, I'm gonna talk through a lot of the findings in the next 45 minutes. But if you want to go through the data yourself, it's freely available on the page you can see here on the RAF website.
No, oh, like, 111 back so just. Here. I think I've missed a slide here.
So, most people who have any interest in rabbit medicine or rabbit behaviour will understand that rabbits need to live with other rabbits. You'll know that rabbits are highly social animals that live in large communities, and when they're kept alone, they show health and behavioural problems, and they'll work very hard for visual access to other rabbits. Now, I want to very quickly show you a slide that just backs up what I said at the beginning.
And that is this. We asked owners, have you ever had a pair of rabbits that fought so badly that you could no longer keep them together? Of these 1200 owners, 40% of them said yes.
Right. So let's start by thinking why rabbits need relationships with other rabbits. It's a good question.
They have very structured social groups. They show stress when they're kept alone. But the evidence actually suggests the group living for rabbits doesn't seem to increase female reproductive success or male longevity.
That's pretty strange. So, we don't really know why and whether why rabbits have such a strong drive to live together. But what we do know is that they really suffer when they're kept alone.
We know that for example, rabbits will work as hard to see another rabbit, even if it's one they don't know, as they will for food. Rabbits need to be with other rabbits. However, rabbits are also very territorial.
In the wild, they live in large groups in which a dominant male will share a territory with several females. And also other subordinate males around a warren. The European rabbit is actually the only, leopard, sort of rabbits and hare species that's known to form these stable social groups.
Typically, these groups include multiple animals of the same sex. Within these social groups, there are very strict linear hierarchy, so the rabbits all know where they sit in the pecking order, and they know the the the the dominance and subordination in each relationship between each pair of rabbits. The dominant male routinely patrols the territory and often requires daily submissive acts from all of the other rabbits sharing the same space.
So usually what happens is the dominant male will advance or lunge or come forward, and the other rabbits will retreat or flee. If they don't retreat, the dominant male will attack. These territories are maintained because the male protect access to the female and to the warren.
Now, even when you have very strong bond relationships, so within, within your Warren, you have certain rabbits, you have a small group of rabbits that, that stay together more, and within that group, you have different sorts of relationships between those pairs. And even when rabbits are very, very close to each other and they get on very, very well, The rabbits don't spend all of their time together. So in one study, free-range male and female rabbits maintained an average distance of 15 to 20 metres between individuals during daytime activities.
And that just shows how much space wild rabbits need in their normal rabbit relationships. So let's think about pet rabbits. When we keep rabbits as pets, we provide an environment that's often very different from the wild one.
It's limited in space, it's limited in variation, and it's limited in novelty. Additionally, when we keep rabbits as pets, owners usually expect the rabbits to interact with them in certain ways, and they want to think that they're meeting some of their rabbit's social needs. And owners may spend a lot of time with a rabbit, and they may not understand what another rabbit can provide that a human cannot.
Now Let's just think about the life of a pair of rabbits and compare that to what an human owner can provide a rabbit in terms of social companionship. A bonded pair of rabbits will probably be able to see each other for almost every waking moment. They'll eat together, explore together, toilet together.
They would groom each other, they'll clean each other's eyes, and they'll provide comfort. There'll be a perpetual source of interest and environmental enrichment to each other. Any environment, no matter how full of toys and objects it is, it's better with someone else in it too.
Rabbits speak each other each other's language. They understand the slightest change in body position or eye appearance, and they give the right response. And they're always there to reassure their companion that they don't need to worry about getting eaten, because they can both be looking out for predators.
Now, however diligent an owner is, they just cannot replace the continuous source of interest, companionship and reassurance that another rabbit provides. Humans can't replace another rabbit because our communication strategies are imperfect and our interactions are time limited. Rabbits need the social interactions of other rabbits.
So, I've described why rabbits need social interactions with rabbits. But the real paradox is that in order to keep them with other rabbits, which is what they need, we need to overcome their innate territorial and sexual behaviours to allow them to form the required relationships. Now, one of the interventions we do to rabbits to reduce these behaviours is to neuter them.
And neutering removes the reproductive organs, and it removes these organs as a source of sex hormones. But in the rabbit, sex hormones are produced not only in the reproductive organs but also from the adrenal glands. This happens in quite a lot of species, but actually the difference with rabbits is that they produce really quite a lot of sex hormones from the adrenal glands.
And this means that even when a rabbit is neutered, and the hormones from the reproductive organs are removed, they still have sufficient sex hormones on board that they continue to show sex-specific behaviours after neutering. And this is why these different combinations of, of rabbits have bonds that are more or less stable. And this is why for this study, we separated the data out for groups, male female pairs, female female pairs, and male male pairs.
Let's just start with some figures on bonding success, because bonding is, is typically seen as being really tricky. And I think, you know, all of you who are, who are watching this today are interested in rabbits, and it's very, very likely that you can think of, of instances in which owners have tried to bond rabbits themselves, and the rabbits haven't bonded, and then the owner's stuck with two rabbits, you can't be kept together. So the first question I asked was whether owners had tried to bond rabbits themselves and whether they had succeeded or failed with different sex pairings.
The owners described almost 4000 attempted pairings, you remember 1200 owners, each, some of them recalling multiple different pair attempts. And of these pairings, 65% of them were male female pairs, so that was by far the commonest one that people attempted. 15% were groups and 10% each were female, female and male male pairs.
You know what, when the results came in, I was honestly quite surprised because. The vast majority of the bonds that the owners record was successful. So they reported 95% of male female pairs were successfully bonded, and then for groups and single-sex pairs, the figure was sort of 80 something%.
So most bonds seem to work, and the owners in our survey were much more likely to try a male female pair than any other combination. Now, obviously, this data may well be biassed by what owners recall, but given that these percentages are so high, it would be surprising if that, if bonds are usually unsuccessful. What's likely is that we may have a slight overestimate or a slight underestimate, but the, the, the, the likely figure of success is not, it's probably not going to be wildly different.
And we also, I had a, a free text box, and I, you know, encouraged owners to, to tell me about their bond, their, their, their rabbit bonding experiences. And they were very different. So we had some owners who found the process really easy.
So, quotes, what, what quotes we have. We had, great experience on this occasion. Never had a problem, and it was so easy.
I didn't even realise it was supposed to be hard to do. But by contrast, we had some owners who said that it was stressful, that it was horrible, but so worth it, or that it was traumatic for both rabbits and us as a family. One owner reported living with a mesh fence across their lounge for 18 months until the rabbits have bonded.
I have to say I'm, I'm hugely impressed and I'm glad that they finally got to a good outcome. But what I've found from this is that rabbits have got that, owners have got very different experiences of bonding rabbits. So, we know that owners are much more likely to try male-female pairs, but the reported bonding success rate was fairly similar for all combinations.
We then asked the rescue centres to rank how easy different combinations of rabbits were to bond. And this graph, we, we, we did a sort of weighted average for, the, the different groups, and so a lower number suggested that, this was an easier pair to bond. So.
You can see that, as I said, 76% of rescue centre said that male female pairs were easiest to bond, and they, they ranked this as being the easiest pair. Now rescue centres commonly reported that they considered owners choice and temperament of rabbits when choosing which rabbits to attempt to bond. And I asked about this because, rescue centres typically have more choice over, over pairs that they can make, whereas owners often just get another rat.
And then the pet sort of has to get on. There is no other option. So I was interested in how rescue centres select appropriate rabbits.
And clearly, you know, the owner choice is very important. But they also considered the size of the rabbits, the breeds of the rabbits, and the ages of the rabbits. I also asked them, you know, how do you know when a bond's going to be, successful?
What sort of things do you look for? And the rescue centre staff said that they'd looked for the rabbits spending time close to each other, so either eating or resting, performing mutual grooming behaviours, and just being near each other without fighting. And then I said, OK, what would you, what would you tell rabbit owners if the rabbit owners are gonna bond their rabbits?
They said, Make sure your rabbits are neutered, bond them in a in a neutral area, often with a divide initially, and give the rabbits plenty of time to get to know each other. So nothing particularly surprising there, but it'd be useful information to have when you're talking with owners. So, we got some great data on how to make bonds formed, bonds form, and we found that actually most bonds, you know, most pairs seem to, to end up with with stable bonds forming.
But we also wanted to learn about how stable these bonds were, so how likely they were to break down. And actually this was the area where the differences between different types of pairs really showed up. So As I said, We looked at, we asked whether the owners had ever had a pair of rabbits that fought so badly they could no longer keep the rabbits together.
I said that upfront, and 40% of owners reported this had happened, which gave us data on 753 combinations of rabbits. We collected data on which types of bonds they were. And then we scaled the data by the frequency of the bonds in the total population.
So what I mean by that is, I looked at all of the attempts that owners had made, looked at the, the percentages of the different bonds in that population. And then I could, from, from that piece of information and the, what the owners reported about the, the, the types of groups that break down, I could scale it so we could get a, a, a sort of risk score. So from this, the data suggested that male-female bonds were the most stable.
The groups, breakdowns had a, had a failure of those relationships, 3.5 times more. Female female pairs break down 4.6 times more than male-female pairs, and male-male pairs break down 5.4 times more.
So we also asked the owners why they thought the bonds had broken down. And about a third of bonds breakdowns were reported to have happened because of illness of one of the rabbits or separation, say for hospitalisation, for example. Then we had puberty, so male rabbits reaching puberty was a, was another big one, or introduction of new rabbits.
And then spring hormonal changes, so when, when you have behaviour changes in the spring because of those persistent sex hormones, and lack of neutering, they were minor reasons actually. So they were, they were much less. Likely to cause bond breakdown than those other ones.
And clearly, the sort of people who are on, on the Rabbit Welfare Association and so's mailing list are the sort of people who likely, invest a lot in their, their rabbits. So they are probably more likely in the general population to have them neutered. And so that may be one reason why lack of neutering was not very commonly reported.
So this suggested that there were differences in the bond stability of different types of bond. And so what we then said to the veterinary professionals, we said, have you seen rabbits in the last year that were brought in because they were fighting with their companion? And the veterinary professionals reported 203 instances of this, and over 50% of these instances involved male male pairs.
So we had a year to recall, so hopefully that the, the, instances were still fairly fresh in their minds. And so we could get reasonable data. So again, we scale this by the incidence of the, of the bonds in the general pet rabbit population.
And obviously, because we know that, male male pairs are, are often much less common, than, say, male female pairs, the fact that 50% of them were present, the 50% of the ones that the vet professionals were seeing were presenting with injury suggests that the injury is much, much more common in that population. And so again, once we scale this, it suggested that that the breakdown of rabbits in groups, and that relationship breakdown, is, is, had a, a, a, a, sort of about 2, the animals in that group were about twice as likely to require veterinary attention. For female, female pairs, when they break down, they were 6 times more likely to need veterinary attention.
But male male pair breakdown, that was 37 times more likely to require veterinary attention than than male-female pair breakdown. So we asked about what had caused it, whether the owners knew why their rabbits had started fighting, cos obviously fights are the, are the major reason that rabbits get injured. And of these situations requiring treatment, the most common reasons were lack of neutering, where young rabbits reaching puberty, usually male, male pairs, and an inadequate or restricted environment.
So we can see that the, the, the veterinary professionals are seeing a different sort of population of rabbits presenting. We also asked whether the veterinary professionals had ever had to euthanize a rabbit because of injuries sustained during a fight with a companion, and 12% of vets veterinary professionals reported this had happened. In 7 cases, these involved male male pairings, 5 of which involved irreparable injuries to the urethra, penis, or scrotum and testicles.
Female female pairs were reported in 2 cases of injury requiring euthanasia. Now one of the, one of the things here is that the external genitalia of male rabbits are much more likely to be injured than that of females, and injuries involving the urethra are very hard to surgically repair. Injuries to males from females often occur when the male mounts the female rabbit's head, and then the female bites it, its external genitalia.
Injuries to males from males often occur when one rabbit lies on its back and kicks out, and this often can cause damage to the penis or testicles, or even injuries to the abdominal cavity, such as evisceration. Now, one thing I would say about the data here is that the veterinary professionals are likely to see a population of rabbits, that where the owners may not be as motivated as the ones in the in the RAF, survey. And so it may be that this population is, for example, more likely to buy a pair of male rabbits from a pet shop, because pet shops often sell male male pairs, because they keep the females back for breeding.
So it may be that the, the date. Is not as drastic as it looks here because this is scaled to the, the survey, population response, but clearly male male pairs are regardless, significantly more likely to, to, to, to to severely injure each other. And then we asked rescue centres about instances in which rabbits had been given up for rehoming because of one breakdown.
And we did the same process. We had 94 reports of this happening, a smaller sample size. And when we scaled the data, it suggested that male-female pairs were least likely to be rehomed.
Groups were rehomed, or individuals from groups rehomed 7 times more. Female female pairs rehomed 57 times more, and male-male pairs rehomed 80 times more. The same caveats.
Apply to the the veterinary sur the veterinary professionals data. It's not likely to be exactly the same population, but it suggests that that single-sex pairs are much more likely to fight severely enough that the owners seek to rehome one of the rabbits. So we, I also ask, you know, what are the key drivers of the bond breakdowns that require rehoming?
And they reported lack of neutering, separation, so, yeah, keeping the rabbits apart, inadequate environments, and unneutered male rabbits reaching puberty, a common theme. So this the sample. The sample, although we've got the biases that I've described, we're still dealing with pretty large numbers of rabbits.
And I think we can certainly conclude from these data that the male, the male-female bonds are more likely to form, less likely to break down. The groups are in general, slightly less stable, and the male male pairs are much more likely to break down and require veterinary treatment, or even rehoming. So, we've had a look through the survey data.
Let's now move on to thinking about how we assess bond formation and bond stability. Let's look at which behaviours are normal and when. So, we often talk about rabbit bonding as a single point in time, perhaps a day, sometimes a week.
And so owners often expect that if they bond their rabbit to another rabbit, both rabbits should then show all of the social attachment behaviours immediately. And I often have worried owners contact me because their rabbit doesn't, doesn't seem to like its new companion. So this is entirely normal.
If you met a new person, you usually don't immediately think the world of them. You don't usually want to spend every waking moment together, especially if you ended up together through no choice of your own. So it's helpful instead to think about phases in the relationship between two rabbits.
The initial phase when they first meet each other, then the phase when they're learning to live together, and then the final phase where they're hopefully living happily together. So, not from, from not, from not bonded to bonded, it's not binary. Instead, we've got these, these phases underneath as the rabbits gradually get closer.
At this point, it's also worth saying that rabbits behave differently in different relationships as well. So dominance and subordinates are qualities of a relationship, not of a rabbit. And this means that it's not unusual for a rabbit that was very subordinate in one relationship to become dominant in another.
Again, this is something that owners can find quite challenging because they will say, oh, he's not as happy or he's more angry or, you know, they see differences, but realistically, these are just facets of the rabbit's personality that are only really expressed in certain circumstances. So let's talk about each stage in turn. So I've called the first stage the encountering phase.
This is, this is what happens when we put two unfamiliar rabbits in an unfamiliar environment with each other. And this is how we usually set up a rabbit bond. Sometimes they may be split mixed, as in this, this picture, with a, a, a fence in between.
Sometimes they're put together in the same enclosure, and this encountering phase may last for a few hours or a few days, or even a few weeks. Now, let's think about what this means. I've divided the sort of behaviours that you're likely to see, or owners are likely to see into normal behaviours and concerning behaviours.
Now, remember that these behaviours aren't really normal from an evolutionary sense. These are the behaviours we see in the artificial environment that we create in order to introduce two unfamiliar rabbits. So when we do introduce two unfamiliar rabbits, we expect them to mostly ignore each other and just get on with exploring their environment and working out their escape routes and working out where key resources are.
As they relax a bit, they may eat, or they may groom themselves. Sometimes you may see the rabbits almost immediately spending time very close to each other without an agonistic or sort of aggressive behaviour, but usually rabbits rarely interact very much in this very early stage. So, the next phase is the tolerating phase.
In this phase, the rabbits are getting used to each other, but they're not really friends. They may sit quietly within sight of each other, but not spend much time together. It's really important in this phase to make sure there's no conflict over key resources such as litter trays or food bowls.
So provide plenty of food, scatter it across the floor. Don't put it all in a single place. Providing grass is pretty good because the rabbits then spend more time eating because the energy density of the food is lower, and then they've got less time to spend on other activities, like wondering why there is another rabbit in their environment and, and, and, and telling them what to do.
So in this tolerating phase, this is where you may see a lot of behaviours where you're the rabbits are trying to establish a hierarchy. Both rabbits are trying to work out who is going to be dominant in this relationship. The sort of things you may see, you may see you may see chasing, humping, or mounting, honking and fur pulling.
Now, provided that one rabbit runs away or freezes, so both of these are, are, are, behaviours that are, showing submission. Provided that one rabbit runs away or freezes, these behaviours are normal and they're a very important part of that hierarchy establishment. One of the things that I often see is that owners misinterpret this stage, and they anthropomorphize.
They, they feel that the rabbit's being picked on or being bullied, but actually this process is necessary to get to a good stable relationship. The time to intervene is if neither rabbit retreats or freezes, because otherwise they may fight, but neither of them are diffusing that situation. Now, at the beginning, the rabbits have to show very obvious hierarchical behaviour.
They have to, they have to show very clear, mounting, chasing, etc. Because they don't know each other well enough, and they haven't already got that history of knowing who is dominant, who is subordinate, that they still need to, to, they need, need to really obviously show what they're going to do. But actually as the rabbits become more familiar with each other, the intensity of that chasing, humping, honking and fur pulling will reduce because they just need to, eventually you just need to have a an animal that just shows a very subtle sign and the other one knows what it means.
In this phase, you may start to see the rabbits starting to spend time close to each other and even grieving each other. I quite often get emails from people whose rabbits are in this stage because they feel that one rabbit is being picked on or bullied, and they want to know if they should separate the rabbits. My answer is almost invariably no.
Usually, the rabbits will spend a a a portion of the day calmly close together. Even if some of the days still consists of a lot of these hierarchy behaviours. Sometimes you may see some mutual grooming and resting together.
This is a really good sign, and it indicates that that relationship is starting to move towards the next phase, even if the owner's still seeing a lot of hierarchy behaviours. If you leave the, the rabbits, the relationship will become calmer and calmer, and those, those, those hierarchy behaviours will become fewer and fewer. Now, this can take weeks or months, but if you've got some time where the rabbits are able to spend time in a good place together, that amount of time will grow and things will change.
Things will improve. Now this is the phase that owners really like, the affiliation phase, it's the phase where the rabbits, they really seem to enjoy each other's company. They lick each other's faces, they explore together, and they sleep next to each other.
So, what behaviours are normal during this stage? The obvious behaviours are those that look pleasurable to us, such as mutual grooming and resting together. Normal behaviours also include low-level hierarchy behaviours, such as chases and retreats.
So one rabbit goes forward, the other rabbit runs away, or posturing, so putting the ears down suddenly, or a slight lunge, or, you know, a, a, a change in facial tension. These normal behaviours also include time apart, sometimes within eyesight of each other, and sometimes not. And at the beginning, I told you that the average distance between two rabbits that have a strong relationship in the wild is 15 to 20 metres during the day.
Just as in your own relationships, space is a very important part of any relationship. The one challenge I often see is when owners misinterpret the phases that the rabbit's going through, they often try to separate the rabbits for portions of the day, or they, they are try, they try to keep the rabbits from ever showing hierarchy behaviours. And this can be really counterproductive because it slows the establishment of that bond.
And if owners are really scared about any of these hierarchy behaviours occurring, it can mean that they never give the rabbits enough chance to establish that relationship and move forward. And actually, they can end up, the rabbits can end up being very stressed for a long time because they aren't allowed to, to, to form that relationship, which will then, you know, give them such good welfare. Right, so let's move on to how you can maximise the chance of stable relationships, because we've seen there are lots of factors that increase or decrease the likelihood of owners achieving stable long-term rabbit relationships.
So what can you do or advise as a veterinary professional to help owners achieve stable rabbit relationships? Depends on the situation. So in this final section, I'm going to talk through a few different situations, and I'm gonna give you a few tips for managing each one.
Let's start with this one. What should you advise if your client is thinking of getting a rabbit? Well, firstly, we all wish that clients would talk to us at this point, right?
It's very, very rare. But in case you encounter it, this is what I'd suggest. The easiest way to start, to end up with a stable rabbit relationship is to start with an established adult pair.
So, I always advise approaching local rescue centres and asking to adopt a neutered, vaccinated, and bonded pair. Purchasing a pair from pet shops is much more risky because most rabbits are sold as juveniles, so the bond may break down during puberty or if the rabbits are separated when they're neutered. So how about if your client has a single rabbit?
Well, although the rates of rabbits kept alone are slowly falling, we think, although they've been a bit more stable, unfortunately, in the recent pool report, many owners still have a single rabbit. We know that rabbits suffer when they're kept alone. So, if your client's got a single rabbit, always have a conversation with the owner, exploring their understanding of what rabbits need socially, and just, you know, inquiring whether they've considered getting a companion.
If they are interested in seeking a companion rabbit, describe the process of bonding. Many owners who've always kept rabbits singly, they won't understand the tension between the rabbit's social needs and its territorial instinct. So they may not realise that introducing rabbits can often be harder than it seems.
Without good preparation and supervision of bonding, owners may find themselves in the unfortunate situation of having two rabbits permanently separated. You know, the worst of all worlds. And again, if we think back to that survey data, the group of people who responded and who had very, very good bonding success are a group of people who are likely to have done a, more reading, and b, have more awareness of what rabbits need.
So their success rate in bonding may be higher than a person who has always just kept a rabbit on their own. Then, if the owner is, once the owner understands that process of bonding, recommend that the owner looks for a companion rabbit of the opposite sex from their, from the, the owner's own rabbit. As from a rehoming centre that bonds the rabbits on site.
And this increases the chance of the rabbits forming a bond, and it reduces the effort and the risk that the owner has to take on. Of course, warn the owner against taking on a rabbit of the same sex because any same-sex pair is more likely to fight when they're introduced, and males are also at higher risk of being seriously injured. How about when, you know, the new rabbit owner, great excitement brings to you a a pair of baby rabbits before they've gone through puberty?
Well, the first time you're likely to see this pair of rabbits is at their first vaccination. I mentioned this very earlier, a little bit earlier, but when rabbits are sold in pairs from pet shops, they're often sold in male male pairs. And this is because the rabbit breeding establishments, often keep young female rabbits back for breeding, so there are more males than females.
However, we also know that male male pairs seem to form the least stable bonds. Er professionals, again thinking back, said that the top two reasons for the bond breakdowns they encountered were lack of neutering and young rabbits reaching puberty, most often male male pairs. Owners said that the major reasons were, illness or separation, but rabbits reaching puberty was also common.
Given the severity of fights between males and given how common it is that pre-pubertal rabbits fight at puberty, if you see a pre-pubertal pair of males, you need to warn the owners of the risk that their rabbits will fight and potentially get seriously injured. Ideally, we would never sell, well, ideally creep pubertal rabbits would never be sold in male male pairs, but if they have been, the only thing we can really do is advise neutring of both rabbits as early as possible. One of the challenges is that if the rabbits fight before they're neutered, or if they fight at all, then it, it gets, it's very unlikely that they will bond again.
Rabbits seem to have long memories, and if you've had a severe fight between your rabbits, it is extremely hard to re-establish a bond. So, to reduce the risk of any bond breakdown in any pre pre-pubertal rabbit pair, advise castration of the male or males at 10 to 12 weeks, or as soon as the testicles descend. Waiting longer than 12 weeks increases the risk that the young male rabbits will fight.
Advised spaying the female rabbits at 16 to 20 weeks of age. Now, once we, once we learned how common and how much of a risk that that this sort of rabbits reaching puberty was for bond breakdown, we then had to look back through all the questionnaires that vet practises had submitted to the Rabbit Welfare Association and fund when they were applying for rabbit friendly practise status. And what this means is that if there are, if the practises want to be accredited.
They fill out a bunch of forms explaining how they, how they treat and hospitalise rabbits at their practise, in order to, for, for the association to work out if they qualify for, for that, the rabbit friendly practise status. When we looked, so I mentioned male rabbits neuter 10 to 12 weeks, female rabbits neuter 16 to 20 weeks. We found that about 80% of practises recommend spaying female rabbits at or before 20 weeks of age, which is great, absolutely in line with what the Rabbit Welfare Association Fund recommends.
However, only 1 in 4 practises recommended castrating young male rabbits at or before 12 weeks of age. But we can see that delaying is delaying has very severe consequences in terms of the bond if you have a young pair of rabbits. So if your practise doesn't currently neuter male rabbits at 10 to 12 weeks, have a conversation with the people in your practise to work out how you can offer this new early neutering, at least in the situation where you've got this prepubertal rabbit pair, to try to ensure that they have better ongoing welfare.
What about if your client's got an adult male male pair? If the rabbits are adults and the bond is stable, then don't interfere with it. We know that male male pairs are more likely to break down and cause injuries to each other.
This data is skewed by the young rabbits reaching puberty, but this is not, this is not the only reason that male male pairs fight. So, it's really important for owners who have a male male pair to make sure they do as much as possible to reduce the risk of bonds breaking down. So making sure that both rabbits are neutered to prevent those kind of seasonal hormonal changes and any fights that result from it.
And always ensuring that if the the rabbits are transported anywhere, they are always transported together and not separated. One thing that I would say, and again, this comes back to owners, some, some owners don't understand what what normal hierarchy behaviours look like. If you have an owner who says that the rabbits, the rabbits are fighting, always ask more about the behaviour.
So, the normal interactions between adult rabbits, are mounting during spring, often one rabbit will mount, the other rabbit will run away. And occasional lunges or growls from one rabbit and immediate withdrawal from the other. Those are fine, those will happen occasionally in almost every rabbit pair.
What to start worrying about if you have a, an established pair that suddenly starts pulling fur or making, doing any injuries that cause bleeding or injury, or if both rabbits are trying to bite or kick each other, those are abnormal interactions. That, that suggests the bond, there's something wrong with the bond. So you can warn the owners of the key signs to look out for that indicate the bond is, is, is, is unstable.
But also reassure them that actually the male-male bonds, once the rabbits have got to adulthood and they've been stable for a while, they're still much, much less likely to break down than if those rabbits were both, both babies. How about you have an owner who has got a pair of rabbits and then they have rescued a rabbit or they've bought a rabbit and they want to introduce the rabbit, wants to add another rabbit into the mix. Now.
In general, if you've got a stable pair or a stable group of rabbits, introducing another rabbit is risky because the existing pair or group bonds will change and they may break down. We know that groups break down more frequently than male female pairs do. If the owner's very keen, or if they have no choice, do suggest they read available resources and potentially seek expert help from a rescue centre with the bonding process.
One thing that I found quite interesting, actually, from the data that we've got, was that the groups were more stable than either of the single-sex pairs, because that's kind of counterintuitive, right? Cause any group is going to have, a, some, some rabbits that are the same sex. But it's likely that the sort of network effect has got a, a generally calming effect.
So, Or sometimes you have one rabbit that is a bit of a sort of mediator or seems to seems to reduce some of the, the tensions between the other rabbits. And this isn't really surprising really, is it? Because your rabbits have evolved to live in groups, so if they hadn't, if they.
Hadn't found a strategy to overcome, the, the tensions between single-sex pairs, then they would not really be able to live in groups. But certainly, groups are more stable than you might expect, given the stability of, of single-sex pairs. And finally, what happens when you have, your client has a rabbit that requires hospitalisation?
We know that illness or separation for hospitalizations are major causes of bond breakdown. So owners, vet professionals and rescue centres all reported this as a risk. And so this means that we need to think very carefully about how we manage rabbit relationships at this critical point.
Unless there's a very strong reason not to, always hospitalise both rabbits in a pair. Yes, there is a welfare cost to the rabbit that's not sick, sick, but it's outweighed by the benefit of increasing the likelihood that the bond will remain stable. Because if the bond remains stable, this benefits both rabbits.
OK, we're almost at the end, folks, so let's have a quick recap. In summary, male-female bonds seem to be easiest to form and least likely to break down. Male female bonded pairs are less likely to need rehoming.
Male male bonds are least likely to work and often break down at puberty, and groups appear to be more stable than single-sex pair bonds. And to improve the likelihood of stable relationships between rabbits, set the bond up for success at the beginning and try to reduce bond disruptions as much as possible. Thank you very much.