Good afternoon everybody and welcome to today's webinar kindly sponsored by Rabbit Welfare Association and Fund. We will be discussing rabbit welfare and ethics, and I have the pleasure of introducing you to our speaker, Doctor Emma Milne. Emma qualified as a veterinary surgeon from Bristol Veterinary School UK in 1996 and went on to work in clinical practise for 12 years.

This was followed by 7 years as a clinical nutrition advisor. Emma has written 10 books on pet animal welfare, mainly highlighting responsible choices, welfare needs of pet animals, and the serious health issues associated with extreme confirmation. She is a patron of RWAF and Dogs Trust and a trustee of the Dog breeding Reform Group.

She represented AWF on the BVA ethics and welfare group for 2 years and is the founder of the global campaign Vets Against Brachycephalism, and continues her welfare and writing work. If you have any questions or comments for Emma as we go along, please hover your mouse on the screen, click on the Q&A box, and we will cover as many of those as we can at the end of the session. But without further delay, let me extend a warm welcome to the webinar vet, Emma and over to you.

Thank you very much, Phil, I try and live up to that amazing, introduction by managing to share my screen firstly, hopefully. . So, one of the things that's amazing is I'm just sitting here watching the chat box tick away while we were waiting.

And there's people from all over the world. It's absolutely amazing. Philippines, Romania, Bulgaria, California.

So that's one of the great things if anything positive has come out of COVID, it's the fact that we end up sharing these things with so many more people. So a big thank you once again to Webinar vets for that. .

So we're gonna have an update today on, a conference that RWAF and myself, hosted in June 2021. We had a normal, RWAF do quite a few conferences for owners and vets, and we had one, a face to face one back, before COVID in, 2019. And when we were talking afterwards, we decided that actually it would be really useful to have one that was dedicated just to, ethics and welfare, because rabbits, and obviously this talk is going to be based very much around the UK, but I'm guessing because so many of you have joined that these issues are, fairly global.

Because rabbits, although they're very popular here in the UK, they are one of the pets that are massively misunderstood their needs. And therefore massively neglected. So this was the lineup.

The only thing that changed was that Nina, was replaced as a speaker by, Anna from PDSA. So we, we haven't got summaries of all of these things, but as you'll see as we go through the talk, actually, a lot of the same issues came up time and again in different, in different contexts. So hopefully, we'll, we'll go through those, have a look at what, if anything, has changed for the better or worse since, and, maybe what we can all do as vets and interested parties going forward.

Apologies if I sound bunged up and a bit weird. The COVID finally caught up with our family this week. And I was diagnosed last Wednesday, so I'm not too bad.

I've had my 3 vaccines, but, if I sound weird, that's why. So we're gonna start with, brachycephaly. I've, I've put this sort of summary in order of the, of the, the, the, the talks on the day.

So, if it seems random, it's just because of that. It was the easiest way for me to do it. So Richard, who is a massive, massive, help to RWAF and very deeply involved, took the, the lead, and he was talking about brachycephaly, which is becoming.

A huge problem, as many of you know, across all species, including now sadly horses, guinea pigs, and so on. But I've tried to pick out some of the, I guess the take home messages that came out of that June conference. And one of the things across all species is that the breed, the, particularly the extremes of breed conformation have really been quite recent developments.

So although we've had some breeds of dogs, for example, for, for hundreds of years, lots of these, particularly cats, rabbits, and so on, the, the new breeds have become, are really in the last, 50 years. And as you can see there with the lion head, only in the last 20 or 30 years that people have Really seem to have started tinkering with. To my mind, the limits of how far we can push these animals to their physical extremes.

For various reasons. The other thing that comes up a lot is that these are really, really popular breeds. Around half the rabbits in the UK are lop-eared, and we'll, we'll talk about, those problems a bit later, but a lot of the lop-eared breeds are brachycephalic, and there are also lots of breeds that aren't lock-eared who are also brachycephallic, and of course you have the ones with the double or triple whammies.

So the popularity is a really big issue, and this will come up time and again when we start to talk about images and things later. Richard pointed out that a narrow gene pool for whatever you're breeding for is inevitably going to make other disease more likely, and it's something that you'll come across often, I think, when speaking to owners, and I've certainly come across it, even when I, cause I tend to bore the life out of my friends with this issue. Is that lots of people don't understand that breeds are a man-made concept.

So sometimes you'll talk about particularly effective breeds and people say, oh well, I, oh, is that not a natural breed then, as if some of them are. And actually, I think lots of vets would like to say to owners, would you like an inbred animal or a pedigree? And lots of them would say, oh, I'd love a pedigree, I don't want an inbred animal because it has negative connotations, but what they don't understand is that actually, pedigrees are inbred by their nature, that's how we get them.

So you inevitably when you narrow a gene pool, you will end up selecting for recessive genes and make other diseases more likely. So this cute shortened face, there's lots of studies into why humans particularly seem to like this big-eyed, short face, and it probably has something to do with instinct and the fact that lots of neonatal animals are fairly brachycephalic. Even the, the long muzzled dog breeds tend to be, fairly short-faced when they're born, and we have this innate nature, .

This sort of inbuilt drive to nurture those characteristics. So that in rabbits has obviously a knock-on effect for physical abnormalities such as nasolacrimal duct and malocclusion, particularly. And I think, you know, some of these things, you might think, well, nasal lacrimal ducts being a little bit convoluted, it's not a big issue, but actually, you can see from one of the photos we've used for the summary slide.

Any of you working a lot with rabbits will have seen these horrible, Sort of scalded faces and so on from the constant tear overflow. And of course, along with the dental issues in, in animals such as rabbits and horses, where you've got constant eruption of teeth, you will end up with inevitable soft tissue trauma and inability to eat because the teeth, unless the teeth line up absolutely perfectly, you're gonna have issues. Fly strike comes as a knock on to that.

Obviously that's also linked to other problems such as obesity and particularly we'll see diet as well, but all these things are quite inextricably connected, I think. So Richard ended his talk with saying that actually, ideally we need to move back to the wild type, breeds, and we do have some things like the Belgian hairs, the Dutch belted, that I've put a picture in there. And also some people have started doing wild crosses where they're actually really trying to get to back towards that wild type.

And he finished with saying that if, even if we don't go back to those wild type animals, we, we certainly at least need to move away from the extremes. And I put at the bottom there, that's comparative radiographs of a brachycephalic rabbit compared to a normal, if Dan's watching, I know he hates the word normal, but should we say a non-brackyphallic, rabbit. And I think that it's fairly easy to see that there's quite, a stark difference between the two.

So the depressing issue of brachycephaly started the day. And next we went on to look at diet, . This is, Nadine who gave us this talk.

And I think there's a few things that I really want to pick out here. And again, lots of things we're gonna say today are obvious to anyone in first, opinion or referral rabbit practise. The, the diet needs of rabbits are still massively misunderstood.

We're still not getting messages out there, and one of the problems is that those types of muesli foods are still being fed, so we've got highlighted there muesli should never be fed. And this is something we've known for, for decades. Hay and grass is so essential, it's essential for their dental wearing, and that's, as we mentioned, one of the biggest problems, causing dental disease is inappropriate diet, lack of time, grinding.

But also the lack of fibre leads to lots of gut issues as we know, dental disease, diarrhoea, and again, fly strike gets mentioned, . It's really important that owners understand this that it's so important for them to have long fibre. Our WAF is a fantastic charity, obviously, and they get a nice mention here in their website is a good, source of information for what types of vegetables and variety you can feed.

I think one of the things I'd I'd love to get across is that this, the next point where pellets are not essential for healthy adults. I think we talk a lot about the difference between pellets and muesli. And of course, we want to get across that muesli shouldn't be fed.

But if people are giving pellets, they need to understand that it should be a real minimum, and as, Nadine put there, it should be really just for enrichment or training, and not viewed as an essential part of, a rabbit's diet. And then, obviously, the things we know about selective feeding, where, the classic analogy that we give in practise often is if you offered a child a salad or a McDonald's. Well, other fast foods are available.

The child is usually gonna pick the burger over a salad, and as soon as you offer selective feeding, you will end up with issues coming from that. So diet's still a big problem in our pet rabbits. So then it was me, I was talking about showing animals and.

Over the years, I, I get, I've done quite a lot of, presentations and talks on showing and personally, I believe that it is not ethical. And we'll have a look at some of the reasons why, and I think it's a, a nice thing to debate. I'm hoping that we're gonna have, 20 minutes at the end of this before you will have to go back to work.

. To, to have a discussion and, and one of the great things about welfare and ethics is that there often aren't very black and white answers, so I'm always interested to hear other people's views. So, I propose that showing actually meets very few of the basic welfare needs of rabbits. I think a lot of pet rabbits don't have their basic welfare needs met.

And if you extend that to showing, it's probably, even worse. I, I went through the five belts basic welfare needs, and I think there are big issues with all of them when it comes to a show environment. So, we talked about tracing during this.

We had, videos of animals being tranced and I've put a photo there. It shows it's fairly common practise because the rabbits are tranced to be inspected for their coats and so on. Animals have no concept of, of their look of whether they're a perfect example of their breed or not.

So being examined, which is particularly stressful for some, for lots of animals, in fact, even not just prey animals, but being turned over and being tranced and being put into what is effectively. Your most stressful escape response, I think is fairly indefensible, for no clinical significant reason. Some of these shows are 2 to 3 days long, so they are gonna have significant travel times.

They may be separated from companion animals, they're gonna spend time in small barren enclosures, and sometimes have quite restricted access to food and water. The other thing that comes up with a lot of rabbit shows is that they're often multiple species. So quite commonly, they're combined with poultry.

I guess, because back in the day, both were, or are in some places now still meat species. But there are quite often times where rabbits are shown in places where there are lots of prey animals as well. So dogs, cats.

I've even heard. Someone describing a story where they were at a show that had dogs, cats, all sorts of other animals, including raptors, all in a big warehouse space where the rabbits were being shown as well. And I think from a stress point of view, you're, you're taking animals that like to hide.

And you're putting them among creditors in open spaces where they have no option to hide because they're there on show. I think it's very questionable. We also touched on show jumping during this talk.

It's very, very popular in Scandinavia, becoming more popular in the UK now. If you search videos online, you'll find lots of them. They, they often show quite obvious signs of fear and stress, reluctance to jump.

They're wearing harnesses, of course, so that they can't escape. And our WEF, we do have quite a lot of concerns about the use of harnesses in, rabbits that are likely to try and flee stressful situations. By the very nature of shows, they perpetuate breeds.

That's why they're there. They are being judged on whether they are a perfect example of their breeds. So shows, to my mind, are going to always perpetuate, extreme confirmation.

And I think that's one of my Fundamental issues with them, and the work I've done in that area. But fundamentally, I'm opposed to them because I've wracked my brains over the times that I've given presentations about showing dogs, cats, all sorts of even farm animals. I, I cannot think of a benefit to the animals that are involved.

You will get people who show dogs saying, oh, they're so happy. They, you know, look at them, they're wagging their tails, but I still question whether they're enjoying being manhandled by a stranger, effectively, and they're just wagging their tails because their owners seem to be happy and they're being praised. So.

I think it is questionable. Again, I'm very happy to hear your views on that. So, Jane from the RSPCA gave us a talk on housing, and, as I'm sure you're all aware, this is also a massive area of welfare problems, in pet rabbits.

When we kept rabbits for meat animals, it makes, or used to make, hopefully, not anymore, sense to keep animals as intensively as possible in small places. So when rabbits started being kept as pets, they transitioned, into hutches that were similar sizes. We know that that isn't adequate.

And I think this photo is brilliant because it highlights so many of the things that are wrong, by being a good example. I mean, because we, even if people can, lots of people know that the rabbits need space, so they'll buy, they'll, they'll try and have a decent sized hutch, hopefully big enough for them to stand up in, stretch out, and so on. And they'll have a separate exercise area.

But one of the things that's so important from a welfare point of view is freedom of choice, and that's humans and mammals across the board and. If you have a separate separate exercise area, those rabbits can never have freedom of choice, but when they come out. They're crepuscular animals, so they're more active at dawn and dusk.

And our lives, it's not very convenient to be out and about at dawn and dusk. So we tend to. Put rabbits in a run when it's convenient to you, which may not be the best time for the weather or their activity, times.

And of course, if they can't hide, if there's something stressful that happens in the garden, such as a bird of prey flies over or there's a cat, if they can't get back to where they feel secure, these are all things that impact. So it's not just the physical size of their environment. It's the fact that they need enrichment, they need hiding places, they need to be able to explore.

And I think if you picture most of our Classic, pet rabbit owners, this sort of setup is It is pretty rare. So PDSA, another charity that, same as RSPCAR WAF they do fantastic work, and they gave us a talk that I've sort of split into four areas, well, they've split it into 4 areas. The poor report, if any of you haven't come across it, it's downloadable every year and it's, it's a huge survey into animal care in the UK talks a lot.

Of dogs, cats, and rabbits and PDSA, don't mind me saying this, but it's often really it is great because year on year you do see areas where. But still, this is one of the latest ones, and you can see that almost half of rabbits in the UK this is are living on their own. So, all of these things would come back time and again to basic welfare needs.

And when we talk about the 5, I, I always think that there's 3 physical needs, if you like. So, diet, which is often, often neglected in rabbits, poor things, and environment again, and freedom from, pain and injury. They're actually the three needs that are easiest to get right.

But the behavioural and social needs are the ones that are so badly misunderstood by lots of owners. And the fact that we've got half of our rabbits living on their own is, is just soul destroying. .

We've got obviously a 25% in inadequate housing, and still at least 50% being fed muesli. So they're, they're quite shocking numbers and hopefully as time goes by they will improve. One of the things the PDSA does is, their pet-wise MOTs, which are brilliant ways to approach consultations.

And I think in general practise, everyone, you know, we all understand the constraints of time and maybe big organisations like this have time to put these in place, but it's something that we should all be looking at is not just looking at the animals that are on your consulting table. But thinking about the environment they're living in 99% of the time that you're not seeing them. And this is a really nice way to approach that.

Ask the owners about what's going on at home. And It's a nice way to diplomatically approach things that they might be able to improve. So even if perhaps they can't have a run like we just saw, if they're a single rabbit, the owner might be able to get them a companion.

So even if they've got a smallish run. They might end up with a companion. So it's ways that you can actually guide them towards better welfare practises and even if you can't make the, the rabbit's life ideal, you can improve it.

They also talked about remote consultations and not just on the sort of COVID telemedicine point of view, which I know is still a, a little bit of a, a grey area, but just in general terms, if you're talking to rabbit owners and say they've got a, a, a rabbit that's coming in for a clinical issue, but they've got another rabbit at home, or you, you think it might be an environmental problem, if you do, you know, so many owners have got smartphones now. You can open up a conversation, get them to show you videos of where the rabbit or rabbits live, and then you can really discuss everything that, that they could do as, as I said, you know, small way to improve those lives. And then if you need a face to face appointment, do that afterwards.

We're all very used to, initiatives like International Cat care's, cat-friendly clinics, but also we should be pushing more. Rabbits are the 3rd most popular pet in the UK, but they're, Ray and I were talking about it earlier before the webinar that they're often seen as this sort of poor relative, in lots of ways. So maybe we should be making a much bigger effort.

To make our practises much more rabbit friendly, things like making sure that their companions come in with them with food from home. They're often surrounded by predator species, and I understand in the vast majority of practises that's gonna be difficult to change. But just small things like non-slip surfaces, how they're restrained, trying to avoid stress.

And then when they're in, obviously, trying as much as possible to keep their environment as stress-free as possible. So that was a, a roundup of, PDSA's view of things that, that are maybe not going so well and things that we could do better. The lovely Ray then gave us a talk about codes of practise.

Now, this is something, she is here for the discussion at the end. So if any of you have more questions about this, please do. But basically, by law, in lots of places, species like dogs and cats and horses are very much looked after under the law, but rabbits are often, a bit forgotten, like in the hutch at the bottom of the garden.

So this started off as a, as a best practise document that could be used by retailers and vets and so on to try and, and improve welfare. But it's become more of a, a hope that that we can actually try and get a code of practise in place by law for rabbits, . This slide's been slightly modified.

It was going to be reviewed and updated in 12 months, which was a while ago now, which has now turned out that that will be February and March, this year, with the hope that that will be presented to DEFRA, in June, later this year. And, and again, with the hope that that will become a statutory code. It's very difficult in the UK for those of you, who may not know from other countries.

Because we're allegedly a United Kingdom, the devolved governments have very different, attitudes sometimes to welfare and the laws are very different in, in the different countries, and maybe Ray can give us a bit more of an insight into that, but this is something that, RWF feel very strongly needs to be put in place, so we're hoping that will be a future action. Dan O'Neill, who lots of you will know as the brains behind, Vet Compass, he came to talk to us about a paper that was done into looking at the morbidity and mortality of animals in first opinion care in, in England. And as I mentioned at the beginning, you'll see that actually lots of these things come up in their different guises, very frequently.

So common health problems linked to inappropriate housing and exercise. Basically, the husbandry of pet rabbits is, is fairly poor. Overgrown nails, they don't get to dig, they're very sedentary.

Some of them, dental problems we've mentioned, dirty bums, nice use of the word bums in a clinical presentation, Dan. Obesity again, because they can't move, they're fed inappropriately, fly strike for many reasons, matted fur. And of course we should be doing better.

I do. I do think the owners, it is difficult because we've just, we've got to try and get to them before they make inappropriate pet choices. Rabbits are social creatures.

Again, this was coming up, in this paper from Vet Compass. Keeping a solitary rabbit is never kind. It's a lovely way to put it.

We should, we're always talking about being kind, in the veterinary profession, but maybe we should apply that more to the pets. This is a classic take home from this whole day. I would love this to get out there.

Rabbits are not children's pets. They I've got two kids who are 10 and 12. They wanted some gerbils.

I made them read my gerbil book for kids that I'd written, they had to do a month of research. They promised me on their lives practically, that they were gonna look after these two gerbils. These gerbils have a massive enclosure for gerbils.

They have enrichment, they have digging, they have everything. And the two things are that the children have needed to be nagged pretty much for 3.5 years now to look after them properly.

It's fallen to us to look after them, which it often does with pets and children. And no matter the size of their enclosure, one of them particularly is spends a fair amount of its day trying to get out of that enclosure. So, I think rabbits are a particularly poor, choice of pet for children.

Children want something they can stroke. Rabbits don't like being stroked in general. They're often very scratchy, they want to get away.

They don't like being held off the floor. They're completely inappropriate, for children, and if there's something you take away from that, it's to try to get your clients not to buy rabbits for their, their, their kids. Again, we come back to this popularisation of breeds.

It feels like I've been campaigning on extreme confirmation for probably 25 years now. And it feels like very little has changed apart from breeds becoming more and more extreme, which I think is, is fairly soul destroying from my point of view. But it, we really have to try and nip this in the bud, firstly, for all species in countries where that hasn't started yet.

And For, for species that are behind, back in, in Richard's, one of the slides I didn't put into his summary was, he said, we can't let this go the same way as dogs, and he had a photo of a horrifically extreme English bulldog. We have to stop this here and now for rabbits, before it gets to that stage. And maybe we already are at that stage if 50% of them are locks or brackies.

So that definitely needs addressing. And I love this as well from Dan's talk. We, I've often said over the years that it's not a right to have a pet.

Lots of people are like, Oh, well, I really fancy having a rabbit, so I'm going to get one. It's like, well, you, it isn't your right to have a rabbit if you can't, provide for its welfare needs. So we should, as Dan says, prioritise the needs of the rabbits above the whims of the owners.

And that's one of the big problems with impulse buying, particularly of small animals. Is that it's done on a whim. So I think that's a really important, key point.

So next it was me again banging on about extreme conformation. And I had covered the main things with rabbits, which are brackies and lots of, as we've, well I've mentioned bracky already. The law beers are a big issue.

They're seen as very cute. They're popularised, even now, some of you, some vets have contacted me on social media saying, oh, I can't believe that, Benjamin in the new Rabbit films is a lop-eared wild rabbit. We'll come onto the media later, but the locks and the brackies are big problems, but also, we, we mustn't forget, the same as in dogs and cats, there are other extremes of confirmation.

It's not just, let's not just talk about those. Extremes of coat in Angoras is a huge welfare issue. They may not be very popular, but for the ones that are, it's being a fastidious groomer and having an untenable coat like that.

I, I can't believe that that doesn't have some sort of psychological impact on these animals. I've put a picture there of, an English block. These have, can have ears that are up to 60 to 70 centimetres long and actually affect their mobility, like, drastically affect their mobility, so they become obese, they don't move because their ears are, are so massively big, they can also have problems with hypothermia.

And of course, all the lop-eared rabbits, when you see them, often as they bend down to eat, their ears are touching the floor, so. Just from a simple physical trauma point of view, these are all issues. No one, well, lots of people flinch when you say, should you ban extremes?

Personally, I think we should. Even if you're not going to ban breeds, we should ban the extremes. We have to have defined parameters that that are the limits to which we can push these animals and then still have a life worth living.

That would be the way I would approach it. So we need to change breed standards, and we need to stop introducing new breeds. So every time you introduce a new breed, that has to be phenotypically different from another one, you will inevitably cause extremes at the end of that and what I call phenotypic squashing.

So the only time we should have a new breed introduced is if someone is trying to make a healthy rabbit that's a, a moderate type, with short hair, erect ears, big eyes, like a wild rabbit. . This might seem an odd thing to say, but.

Extreme confirmation in dogs and cats causes a lot of unnecessary suffering in my view. But they do tolerate it a bit. The reason I say that rabbits tolerate it less well is, firstly, they're prey animals.

So if you do anything to alter their senses, like, make them not be able to hear very well because their locked ears are full of wax or abscessated. If you make them so hairy that they can't see properly. If you Make any of those changes to sight, hearing, smell, .

If you make them feel tangled up and knotty, that will have an impact on their physical wellbeing and their stress levels because they're prey animals. The herbivores, so if you change the shape of their skull at all, you will have knock-on effects onto their dentition, which is a huge welfare issue. And I mentioned plant degrade as well, because these animals are spending their whole time.

Effectively on the floor, whole body on the floor. So as soon as you do anything that changes, coats, particularly, obviously, that's gonna have a big issue for the, the amount of debris they're collecting as they're moving around. I think this is really important.

Breeds are a man-made concept. I mentioned it earlier. We should be caring about these species, not the breeds.

When people talk to me about, oh, you don't want rare breeds to disappear, I, I don't care. I, I, I don't care. If a breed is, has a level of disease which is so significant that it's unarguable, they shouldn't be bred.

That's, it's immoral. And on that note, we, I, I genuinely think that the evidence is so overwhelming for this, that, it is a moral responsibility to stop breeding for extreme body shapes. Also, rabbits are gorgeous, aren't they?

That's why we started keeping them as pets. Look at them, they're just so beautiful. What's the obsession with the breed?

So Obviously this is gonna be fairly obvious because the same things came up quite frequently. In the UK we have around a million, pet rabbits. They're the 3rd most popular.

So as we said, half of them are locks or brackies or both. That's, that's a hell of a lot of suffering. If you add on to that, the normal types who are inadequately housed and have an inadequate diet or are on their own, it's a huge melange of, of poor welfare.

So as vets, we need to do more to recognise their specific needs and help owners improve their welfare too, as we spoke about talking to owners maybe. Have Some more free advice sessions where we get owners in to talk about pre-purchase advice particularly and and perhaps clinics to look at what they've got at home at the moment and how you can improve that. Inappropriate diet, as we said, huge cause of morbidity and mortality, and it's still messaging, not getting out there.

Too many kept in isolation, as we said, around 48%. Too many don't have freedom of choice or adequate exercise, and in many cases they cannot exercise at all, which is really important. Some of them can't even stand up on their back legs or stretch out in their hutches.

Extreme conformation, predominantly brachycephaly and lop ears are a major cause of morbidity and mortality. Showing prey animals, is problematic, certainly, to say the least in my opinion, from a welfare point of view. Rabbits are not suitable pets for children, and, there are lots of people that I speak to who would argue that even adults, as adults, we can't ever meet their, their needs in captivity.

When you see, someone contacted me recently on Facebook with a study from Germany, I think it was, showing the size of territory that a, a, an animal in a rabbit in the wild would have versus in captivity and. I, I genuinely think that we need to ask pretty severe ethical questions about whether we feel that they're appropriate to keep as pets at all. And quite clearly we still have a lot to do.

So, to be very, very fair to some of the people mentioned in this slide, lots of organisations have had policies in place for a long time, but one thing we wanted to come out of June was to say to, it was a stakeholder event was going to be, when it was a physical conference, and then when we had the opportunity to get so many more people involved because it was virtual. We still had the stakeholders there and we wanted it to be something where we could work together and say, so given all this information, what are we gonna do going forward? So after June, the June conference, RWEF made a pledge that we would completely stop the use of lock or BRCchi, images in any materials unless it was for clinical reasons by the end of 2021.

This is fairly difficult and we'll come on to why, in a minute. But it has been done. That was a pledge we made and, and has been stuck to.

PDSA, as you can see, I won't read these out in full, but they go even further. They, don't use any animals that have got exaggerated breeding, including los giants, dwarfs, and so on, again, unless they're highlighting clinical problems. RSPCA the same, is very glad to hear that we've done that.

They, as an organisation avoid using images of brachycephalic features or lopes as well. This week, Closer Magazine have spoken to Ray and RWF and have said that they will aim to end all use of brackets or lots in their magazine and they're also going to approach their advertisers to see if they will do the same. Pets to home haven't sold muesli for years, for rabbits, and they've said that they now have policies in place for the last couple of years that they don't use any.

And what I love from their, quote, particularly is that from their internal marketing teams, even if the pets are borderline bra, they will reject the images and ask for them to be replaced. It might sound petty going on about the images so often, but the problem is that every single time an image is shared of a lone rabbit sitting next to a bowl of muesli in a hutch, in whatever setting it is. It subliminally gives the messages to owners that that's acceptable and that's what we, we definitely need to change.

That's half changed side. So looking forward, time for rabbits stop being the poor relative. I think we definitely need legislation.

We need rabbits to be considered as important as, as dogs and cats. And that legislation needs to cover their basic welfare needs, which are clearly not being met. Personally, I think it should cover extreme conformation as well, and we need to be looking at, regulating breeding maximum numbers of litters, ages, and licencing breeders.

It would be nice to see I think retailers have a massive part to play in this. They shouldn't, there shouldn't be anyone who can walk into any pet shop and buy or an online pet shop and buy a tiny cage for a rabbit. That has to stop.

Nutrition, as I said, pets at home don't sell muesli, that should be across the board. It should be just be unobtainable. And none of them should be selling single animals, of social species.

I'd rather none of them were selling live animals, but if they are, they certainly shouldn't be selling the social species on their own. Images, this came up today. I, I don't sleep very well, and in the night, I was thinking about my talk, and I thought, hang on, if we're really struggling, so RWOF to go back a step, when we made that pledge in June, we were chatting about it, and it's actually very difficult for lots of organisations to find photos of erect eared, moderate-looking rabbits, because, as we've said, the others are so, so popular that, it's very difficult to find them.

So maybe as a stakeholder group, we should be approaching the stock photo companies where everyone gets them from and saying you can't, we, we'd clear out probably 70% of their rabbit photos. We could do the same for cats and dogs, it would be awesome. Clear out, right, you can't have muesli in there, you can't have a rabbit in a hutch, you can't have a lopy, you can't have a bracket, you can't have an angora.

And say to them, look, this stops, and then you commission great photos that are just the welfare that, that we want those messages to be. And then I was talking to my husband about it at lunchtime and he said, well, maybe. You, as a stakeholder group should set up your own, get the photos commissioned, and then the charities make money and the photo messaging gets out there.

So, you can all think about that. Should we ban showing? Personally, I think we should, again, open to discussion.

Let's try and make that practises more rabbit friendly. Media, the images and the messaging has got to change, touched on that a lot. Social media is a real double-edged sword, and as vets and nurses and interested parties, whoever's watching this.

You should never, ever, ever share on social media photos of extreme confirmation or poor husbandry, children hugging animals, rabbits being held off the floor, rabbits on their own. And vet practises do lots of social media, and it's really important that you have in place someone who has proper control of what images and what messaging goes out on that platform. And education.

It comes back to this every single welfare and ethics conference that we do or I go to. Is we have to try and get to people before they get the animals because inappropriate pet choices are a huge issue. Rabbits are not easy pets for anyone, not just kids, and they're definitely not pets for kids.

But education is absolutely key and if anyone's got bright ideas about how we can do that, I'm all ears. So hopefully, we've got 15 minutes, to have some discussion. I leave this here.

Vets Against brachycephalism, we've got vets, nurses and related professionals on there from 66 countries worldwide. If you want to sign up as an individual or as a practise, I would love you to do that. There's a signup page.

I, this looks like a blatant plug for my kid's book about rabbits, but it is because it's really important. If you want to help educate people, it's for children aged between about 8 and 12, teachers the basic welfare needs. It's endorsed most importantly by RWEF and 10% of the royalties go to the charity.

So if you can use it or promote it, then please do. But I thank you for listening. I, it's brilliant.

We had over 1200 people sign up for today. Obviously, lots of them can't watch live but will be, afterwards, and that from a, a welfare point of view is just brilliant news. I'm, well, I and RWF are over the moon with that.

So I'm open to questions and I think Ray is too. Thank you so much for that, Emma. Yeah, the, the questions have been piling through, you know, as, as we've been going along, it's, we've been inundated, and I was going to say Ray's been squirrelling away, but perhaps I should say she's been rabbiting away trying to answer as many of them as possible that's been away.

Not at all, not at all. There does seem to be a few kind of common themes which maybe we can, we can touch on. I don't know if Ray wants to.

Kind of unmute and get kind of get involved as well and, and give her 2 pence worth so she's still busy typing, I think. But if I just start with this one that I've got at the top here, so this is from Elaine, and she said with medical advances now for rabbits, could I ask Emma's thoughts, Ari, the ethical decisions, are we prolonged treatments given their prey species in terms of conditions such as severe head tilts, tripod bunnies, etc. Oh great question.

I, I think I might be the wrong person to ask this, because I think I'm probably a bit Too extreme. I, I, I think we do way too much across the species, already when I see programmes like Supervet, and I think for species particularly like cats and rabbits, I think prolonged hospitalisation. I know analgesia has improved, and I know anaesthesia has improved in rabbits, but I still I, I think it's highly questionable.

I think, you know, if you've got a rabbit having to be hospitalised, and the thing is, and I hold my hands up here, I haven't been in general practise since 2008. I've just done welfare stuff since then. So I, I honestly don't know, I'd be lovely if a rabbit, professional who's in, in specialist practise wants to chip in with that because they will be doing these procedures.

I think with, with all these things, you need to take it on an individual animal basis. There will be some rabbits that tolerate it more than others, and it will depend on what you're doing. I think anytime you're talking about amputating legs from plant degrade animals, it's, it's questionable.

And as you say, things like prolonged treatment, particularly that's gonna be orthopaedic or, Particularly painful, I, I, I think is, is questionable. Yeah, yeah, I absolutely agree. I think it, you know, just the welfare is always a question with these procedures, you know, it shouldn't be a case of what can we do these days.

It should be, should we be doing it, you know, and in the view of, of the animal, does it actually benefit the animal or is it just the owner that we're benefiting in the I think the survival time's important as well, you know, I know it's relative to their lifespan, but I think. That's what I'd always take into account. I, when I was doing the clinical nutrition advice, we, you know, we used to get phone calls from some really spurious thing, decisions that have been made.

So, yeah, I, I think a lot of the time it is for the owners. I, I don't think they should always be given, you know, you'll sometimes hear vets refer to a referral vet, and that vet then gives the owner the options of, well, we can do euthanasia or we can do everything possible. And actually the owner, of course, is gonna say, do everything possible, because they're gonna feel so guilty if they don't.

But equally, there should always be an, it should always be a euthanasia is a treatment option, that's something that we should get across to people. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Thank you for that.

It's one of the other, common trends in a lot of these questions that are coming through, we just obviously you touched on. The muesli, we've touched on it a few times, and I mean I I myself, you know, it's been quite a while since I was in practise, but it astounds me that it is still utilised. It is still readily available out there, although, as we said, you know, pets at home and certain companies have made moves to remove it, which is great.

Is there more that we can be doing, you know, is there petitioning or something that we can do to actually ban? You know, muesli being available out there for these animals where it is completely inappropriate. Yeah, I don't know.

Who, who is in charge of it? Maybe it's the companies, you know, there, there are, food companies that, that have completely stopped it as well. So maybe again, like the images, it's going to the source of the problem, because if the retailers can't buy it in the first place, they can't sell it.

So maybe if we are gonna petition or as, again, I love the idea of stakeholder groups working together. I think in the charity sector, it's a shame that so often, organisations don't seem to, to get this consistent messaging out because they're all vying for charity funds. So it would be lovely if a group of interested parties could go to every single food manufacturer there are, and say, you have to stop making muesli for rabbits.

Because the same as the breeds, the owners, if it's there, they'll buy it. And we can't particularly blame them for, for not buying it. If a pet shop, which is allegedly the place you go to get everything that is right for your pet, is selling it.

And the same with the breeds. If someone, if they're inundated by photos of lots and, and brackies, and no one's saying from a breeding point of view that it's wrong, then why shouldn't they buy them? We can't condemn them for it.

So maybe we need to, to target the companies themselves rather than the people selling it. I think one of the big issues, and it, it comes back to education, is that you'll see it lots in practise with dog and cat owners. They want lots of flavours of stuff because they think their animals are gonna get bored with the same flavour.

Well, rabbits in the wild, they eat grass, right, they eat occasional other things that they find, but 95% of their time they eat grass. And that's what we need to get across is that they should be eating grass. That's what they want.

So yeah, I think we need to get the messaging out there and cut the supply of the, the bad stuff. Yeah, I think a lot of the the welfare issues, particularly with rabbits, actually deal with behavioural issues of, of the owners, don't they? It's, you know, like you say, it's the anthropomorphism that they need all these different flavours, or it's the neoinization that, you know, that they, they look like babies, so we want to nurture them and that, you know, our our child surrogates and It's not appropriate for the animal, and we need to try and at least say educate people and move away from these, these kind of processes and maybe it's the same as social needs, isn't it?

Lots of people think, particularly with house rabbits, we haven't even touched on and be a really interesting discussion one day is lots of people have house rabbits now, but if they're a single rabbit, the fact that they've got you as a friend doesn't, one of the things that came up in June actually, I've only just remembered this is that someone was saying that one of the surveys that have been done. Was people with single house rabbits where they, the rabbits seemed really happy, you know, they might have had really good environmental enrichment, they could dig, da da da. And they were very bonded with their owners, really happy to sit with them and so on.

Then they'd been advised to get a companion rabbit, and the initial rabbit had just sort of flipped the owner of the bird, for the want of a better expression, and said, I'm off then. And the owners had actually said, it made me realise that. The rabbit was bonded to me because it didn't have any choice.

And actually it was so much happier once it had a rabbit. So, yeah, exactly as you say. Yeah, yeah, how, how sad it was just making do really, wasn't it?

Just making do with you as the owner that's all I've got to work with. Oh dear. Wonderful.

There's, there's so many comments and things that are that are coming through and Ray is still typing away. Ray, I'm hoping you can hear me. I don't know if there's any, anything particular that you think would be worth kind of bringing up.

I know there was one larger topic, about I think where you'd kind of mentioned. How important it was that they have companion bunnies, if you will, and, you know, even if they've got maybe a small occasion and haven't necessarily got the facilities, and there was a question that came up on that, and I know Ray kind of said, well, I'm not sure if we're gonna have time to debate this one, it could be, could get a little bit heated. But you know, the, the welfare implications of which is the right way to go, do you put another rabbit in that situation, or is that impinging obviously on the second rabbit's welfare, you know, if they've got you know what, as I said that, I thought literally as it came out of my mouth, I thought that that should be picked up on because it, it's not what I meant to say.

It's not, yeah, you shouldn't confound it if you, if you've got a totally inadequate, . Environment, don't confound it. It was just an example I was trying to think of of something that might improve a rabbit's life if they couldn't do something else.

And it was probably the wrong example to pick. So very well done for pointing that out. But yeah, I think really the point I want to get across is that, For people who've already got one or two rabbits in a poor-ish situation, obviously it would be up to the vet and, and even with, you know, with our laws in England, our welfare laws, you can, there will be some of those cases that are actually a violation of the welfare law before it gets to the stage of suffering.

So it depends very much on the scale, you know, the, the spectrum. But what I want to get across is that if you talk to, if you spend, spend the time to talk to owners about the environment and, and what else is going on at home, say, for example, if they, are having muesli and they don't have enough hay, just getting them to, to give the body size of the animal in hay a day makes an improvement, or giving them a bucket to dig in. You know, there's little things that they can do that would massively improve the psychological well-being of the animal, without costing a fortune.

And obviously, in some cases, yes, the, the, the pet is, is inappropriate and then you have to have the ethical discussion with the owner about whether it's better to get rid of the, the animal, get rid of rehome the animal, . Or try and do what you can with the environment. And again, that all comes back to individual, choices and individual situations.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I just, I think it's probably a, a good place to have our, our last kind of comment and discussion point. Obviously, the brachy syphilism is, is a key kind of topic for, for yourself personally, and there's been quite a few kind of comments coming through around that and obviously a lot of the content of the talk was about that is, well, firstly, I have to say that there's a lot of comments coming through saying thank you for your honesty and for being so.

Saying just ban them. Let's just not not have them anymore. People actually really appreciated the brutal honesty there, which is nice.

But you know what, what I think the industry as a whole, certainly in the UK, we do seem to be talking about this a lot more, maybe more so in, in dogs and other, other species than, than we are in rabbits. But what would you kind of say, what would the would be the main points that That we could do next steps to really get some legwork on this and to make improvements and to to reduce them and maybe get to that point where we can ban them completely, you know what what's kind of What can we do as, as an industry, what, what more can we do to get, really get this message across and get it home to people? I, I wish I knew the answer to that because I, the first interview I did about Bulldogs was in 2004.

No, the first programme I did about Bulldogs was in 2004, and they have got worse in that time. So that's already nearly 20 years. I did articles about it before then.

I've written the books. The problem is, Social media again, celebrity endorsement, films like Patrick the Pug, you know, the media, Peter Rabbit, I mean, you know, you hang your head in, in, in despair, looking at things imaging like that on a really popular kids' film. Personally, I think that the equivalents of the Kennel Club have a massive job to play, and if they, So when it comes to rabbits, it'll be the people setting the breed standards.

You know, that those breeds should go, or the breed standards should be changed, and they have to stop winning prizes. Because until the people setting the breed standards who are, who often put themselves forward as the bastions of health and welfare for the species actually are the ones who are most perpetuating the fact that it's all right. So I lay a lot of, blame at their door actually, across the species, because people, when they want to buy an animal, they look at the breed websites and the, the Rabbit Council website and the International Cat Fancy and the Kennel Club website.

They don't talk to their vet. No one goes to their vet before they buy an animal. .

So until the, the people in charge of the breeds start taking responsibility for their health and welfare properly, I don't think much will change. It is needs to be the law or they need to start taking responsibility. That's my view, and again, I'm probably a little bit extreme, more extreme than a lot of people.

I'm, I'm just sick of seeing it. Honestly, it, I, I get messages from vets all around the world saying, I am seeing these animals on a daily basis, and their hearts are breaking. And then you have owners saying things like, oh well, you will make money out of it, so you should be happy.

And it's like, honestly, if you knew how many vets are having drug related issues or depression or committing suicide because they're just picking up the pieces of these things. You know, you see a different side to it, and I, I, that may seem like I'm overstating it, but I'm not, because I, I hear from a lot of people. And this is why I left general practise, is extreme confirmation.

I didn't want to become a vet because I was just gonna fix problems that we've created because of breeds. It's, it's not what I was in it for, . Sorry, that's a horrible, depressing way to end the thing.

That's my fault for bringing it up, but it's, it's the ugly reality, isn't it? It's literally is that, you know, that that's what we're facing and it is a serious problem, you know. I think what I'd love to get across with the rabbits as well is that so many people talk about brackycephalism, and, and I've ended up talking about it a lot because I've been quite vocal about it, about extreme confirmation, and this became the epitome of it.

But what I'd love to get across is not just brachycephalism, and in the brachycephalic animals, particularly the dogs, it's not just about their boass. They've got multiple problems. The lop-eared rabbits are, are just as big a problem, you know, the morbidity associated with that is, is just as bad.

There are so many extremes of confirmation, we, we shouldn't actually just be focusing on the brachycephaly. It's become sort of the iceberg poster child for extreme confirmation, but there, we, we mustn't lose sight of the rest of it. Yeah, absolutely.

I think that that that is an excellent point to finish on, you know, so we're kind of looking at the bigger picture and all of the, the confirmation issues which we, we are creating as a society and in these species which we're supposed to be caring for. So, let's kind of look at that as a, as a bigger picture, but I think there's still, there's so many comments coming through, but I think, you know, we're we're at that time it's we're gonna have to start wrapping things up so I don't want to. Stop, Ray mid flow of of typing the answers, but it's been so wonderful, to hear you speak today, Emma, so, so passionately and you've got so much information that everybody's really appreciated receiving today.

So to everyone that has joined, thank you so much for your time. I do hope you have enjoyed our update, yeah, and taken a lot from it, not least from the ability just to ask your questions directly to you both to Emma and Ray here, so thank you. Therefore, to Ray and of course our sponsor Rabbit Welfare Association and fund.

Thank you to Kyle, our controller behind the scenes here for making sure everything ran smoothly today, and most importantly, a huge thank you to Doctor Emma Milne for covering such an important update. I will let you all hop off now, pun intended, and I look forward to seeing you all again soon on another webinar. Thank you both.

Thank you.