OK, so today I want to talk to you about how to help rabbit owners to manage aggression in their rabbits. In one study, 13% of rabbit owners reported that their rabbit regularly showed aggressive behaviour towards people and 24% of owners have been bitten by their rabbit at least once. Aggression doesn't only cause a risk of injury to the owner, but it also indicates that the rabbit itself is very stressed.
Aggression in rabbits can cause severe health and welfare problems, and so helping owners to manage it can vastly improve a rabbit's quality of life. Now, let's start with the story. I'd like to tell you about a rabbit called Babbitt.
Babbitt spent the first few years of her life with two loving owners who had to give her up when their situation changed. Now at the rescue centre, Babbitt was really unhappy. She was kept in a small cage and she was lifted out to be introduced to prospective new owners.
This meant that her behaviour changed. She started growling when anyone touched the door of her cage. If people reached in, she would try to box them with her paws and try to bite any skin that she could see.
As a result, as you can imagine, she didn't appeal to prospective owners. So what Babbitt was doing was using aggressive behaviour to deter unwanted interactions. And when the behaviour was no longer productive, she stopped showing it.
So once she was rehomed, she had a companion, a bit of training, and a lot of space. She became a friendly, confident rabbit who would come over and ask to be stroked. Nevertheless, on the very infrequent times that she needed to be picked up, she would always growl.
And so what happened is she'd learned the aggressive behaviours when she needed them. When she was managed in a way that didn't cause fear and frustration, she didn't use them. But because she'd learned them, they remained part of her behavioural repertoire.
So I want to start with the key point of this talk. Fundamentally, aggression both indicates and causes significant welfare problems in rabbits. Rabbits are aggressive when their welfare is poor, and pet aggression causes breakdown of the human-animal bond.
To manage aggression, try to change the rabbit's motivation and reinforce incompatible behaviours. So in this talk, I'm going to explain why rabbits show aggressive behaviour and why it causes a problem to the rabbit and the owner. I'm going to describe the different types of aggressive behaviour and how to tell them apart.
And finally, I'm going to explain how to reduce aggressive behaviour in rabbits. So let's start by exploring why rabbits show aggressive behaviour. What's the definition?
Aggressive behaviour is behaviour that involves actual or potential harm to another animal. But actually, in this talk, I'm not just gonna talk about aggressive behaviour, because aggressive behaviour is just one end of a spectrum of behaviour. When animals are trying to resolve conflicts, aggression can be very useful, but it also takes a lot of effort and energy.
So actually, most conflicts are settled by threat displays and intimidating behaviours that don't actually cause any physical harm at all. And we call these behaviours agonistic behaviours. So this is broader than aggressive behaviours because they also include threats, displays, retreats, placation and conciliation.
Some of the behaviours that we would class as agonistic behaviour, such as growling and lunging, are perceived as aggressive by owners. So to avoid confusion, I'm just gonna talk about aggressive behaviour. But remember that not all rabbits that the owners describe as aggressive will actually try to injure a person or another rabbit.
Now for those of you who've seen my talks before, you'll know that I always end up talking about wild rabbits simply because pet rabbits have only fairly recently been domesticated. And so when we're trying to understand the roots of behaviour, we have to look to the to the wild animals. In the wild, rabbits show aggressive behaviour to other rabbits or to predators.
In a wild social colony, aggressive interactions among female rabbits are aimed to try and acquire or to acquire or defend exclusive access to warrens for rearing babies. In male rabbits, they tend to be show aggression when they're establishing dominance or mating rights, and all rabbits, regardless of their sex, will show aggression towards unfamiliar rabbits to defend their territory. This is intra-specific aggression.
And also when rabbits can't escape from a predator, they will show aggressive behaviour as their last line of defence. Now, this kind of separation of intra-specific versus anti-predatory aggression is not always particularly helpful when we're trying to resolve it. Because in a domestic environment, the rabbit may show aggressive behaviour towards an owner when competing for food, when defending a perceived territory, when fearful, or when frustrated.
So actually it's often more useful to consider the more specific motivations. So, lots of reasons for rabbits to show aggressive behaviours towards rabbits, humans, or other animals. In the wild, most aggressive behaviours towards animals of other species are anti-predatory.
But as I just mentioned, when we raise rabbits with humans and other species, expecting them to share space and resources, we display some behaviours that are typically expressed only towards other rabbits onto, onto other species. Now in this talk, I'm gonna focus on aggressive behaviours towards humans, because this is what owners usually mean by aggression. What do we think that rabbits want to achieve when they show aggressive behaviour?
They either want the other animal to show submissive behaviours or they want it just to go away. So clearly aggressive behaviours enable rabbits to get what they need. But most pet rabbits don't show aggressive behaviours.
Why is this? This is because aggression is a last resort behaviour. For the best chance of survival, animals need to do things that enable them to survive and reproduce.
Aggressive behaviour requires energy and takes time away from other activities. Rabbits and stable groups don't show true aggression. They show occasional threat postures, but they don't bite or fight.
If one rabbit shows threat behaviour to another, the response of the attacked rabbit may be to move away from the attacker or to adopt a submissive posture where they lay back their ears, sometimes they flatten their head, their forepaws, or their whole body to the ground. And what these signs do is they reduce the arousal level and they reduce the expression of the behaviour from the other rabbit. Now, there are many reasons that we've actually taken away some of those motivations from pet rabbits.
So most pet rabbits are neutered, so they don't show many sexual behaviours. They live with familiar companions, so they shouldn't show territorial aggression. And so, in general, what we need to remember, the reason that most rabbits don't show aggression is because they only show aggressive behaviours when they feel that the energy expenditure is justified by the outcome.
So, We've understood why rabbits show aggressive behaviour, but now let's consider why showing aggressive behaviour is damaging to a rabbit and why we, why we should think about resolving it. First, aggressive behaviour indicates that the rabbit is experiencing poor welfare. Let's consider this diagram of the five domains framework, which represents a way of thinking about animal welfare.
The 4 physical domains at the top represent the functional parts of the rabbit's life. And all of these parts affect how the rabbit's mental state, how it feels about its life. And when we, we have a look at the motivations that drive aggression, and you can see a lot of these in the negative effects box, aggression is a symptom of poor welfare.
It indicates that the rabbit is not, is not feeling great about its life. Additionally, a rabbit that's showing aggressive behaviours also causes stress or injury to the animal or person at which the behaviours are directed. Aggressive behaviours between rabbits can cause chronic stress or severe injury.
Aggressive behaviours towards humans can cause injury and can affect the owner's bond with the rabbit. A weaker bond between owner and pet reduces the owner's motivation to care for the animal and increases the likelihood that the animal will actually be rehomed. So I said that aggressive behaviours indicate stress.
Any rabbit in a situation that is stressful enough can show aggressive behaviour. Activation of the sympathetic nervous system, the fight or flight system, causes adrenaline release and drives self-preservation behaviours. If the rabbit can't escape, it will try to fight its way out of the situation.
This modified stress escalation ladder shows the behavioural escalation during an acutely stressful situation. When a rabbit is not stressed at the bottom in green, its goal is to satisfy normal life behaviours such as feeding, mating or exploring its environment. When it senses danger, it needs to assess the degree of threat.
It's heart rate and respiratory rate increase, so it can escape as soon as it needs to. When it thinks that the threat is sufficiently bad, it tries to increase its distance from the threat by running away. Rabbits often thump to alert other rabbits to the threat as well.
If a rabbit can't escape from the situation, it then uses aggressive behaviours to try to force the threat to retreat. So a single incidence of aggressive behaviour indicates acute stress. Aggressive behaviour also causes stress because it requires the same nervous and hormonal activity.
This means that if the rabbit repeatedly shows aggressive behaviours, it is frequently in a high stress state. So, repeated instances of aggressive behaviours indicate that a rabbit is chronically stressed. This is a very, very simple diagram.
But fundamentally, chronic stress causes increased release of the stress hormone cortisol, which drives brain changes at a cellular level, resulting in decreased regulation of cortisol release. And this is a feed forward, this is a positive feedback system. Abnormal cortisol levels affect immunity and resilience to other stresses, resulting in worse worse physical health.
Chronic stress behaviours look quite different in different rabbits, but all of them reduce the time that the rabbit spends on feeding or on exploratory behaviours. So, examples of chronic stress behaviours, restlessness, hyperreactive behaviours to non-threatening stimuli, lack of interest and lethargy, hiding, stereotypic behaviours, and lack of self-care behaviours such as grooming. So there are lots of different ways that chronic stress can present in rabbits.
Now, We've talked about why stress is is causes a problem to the rabbit and why aggressive behaviours indicate stress. But let's have a look now at what what aggressive behaviour actually looks like. We've talked about that that rabbits with good welfare should never need to try to harm another animal.
All rabbits kept with other rabbits will occasionally show threat behaviours, but provided that the other rabbit defers to the threatening rabbit, neither will need to try to harm the other. Let's have a look at what aggressive behaviour looks like. Let's imagine a situation where a rabbit wants access to a certain resource, say a bowl of particularly delicious food, and its companion rabbit is eating from the bowl.
What's gonna happen? The rabbit's got a choice. Either it thinks it has a a chance of moving the other rabbit away from the bowl or it thinks it doesn't.
In the latter situation, the rabbit will withdraw and not bother to challenge for the resource. If it thinks that it has a chance of moving the other rabbit away from the bowl, it will first give a threat. In effect, if you don't move away from that bowl, I'm gonna make you move away.
The rabbit will abruptly move its head towards its companion with half closed eyes and mouth open. If the other rabbit does not move away, the rabbit that wants the feed will run at the other rabbit. If the other rabbit runs away, the first rabbit is likely to chase it further away from the bowl before it returns to eat.
If the other rabbit does not move away. The first rabbit will bite it. If the other rabbit still does not move away, the two rabbits will fight.
And fighting, it kind of looks like reciprocal wrestling. So the rabbits bite, they repeatedly kick each other with foreign hind limbs. Sometimes they bite and hold on while they're kicking.
And they, they can sort of roll over. You might see fur flying, and these kicks are really vicious. So a rabbit can disembowel another rabbit by kicking at its abdomen.
So if we look at this progression, you can see that the escalation of the aggressive behaviour occurs because of the lack of response of the other rabbit. At any point in this escalation, the aggressive behaviour can be diffused if the other rabbit submits or withdraws. Now let's have a little look at what some of these behaviours can look like.
So, this is a threat display towards an owner that is stopped as soon as the owner withdraws their hand. 6 So you can see a growl, a lunge, as soon as the hand goes back, the rabbit doesn't see any reason to to chase or fight because there's been withdrawal. Let's, oh, not that one.
Let's have a look at the next one. This is a rabbit that is trying to bite its owner, who's who's wearing padded trousers to protect their legs. This is actually an example of territorial aggression, which we'll talk about later.
So you can see this rabbit is not, is not trying to protect itself from from something it's finding particularly fearful. You've got a flick there where it's spraying some urine. But the rabbit is, is working hard to try and find an area that can actually bite.
And Finally, These two rabbits are separated, but they're still trying to fight. And you can see the attempts to both bite and kick each other, and you can see that neither is withdrawing. If these rabbits were not separated, one of them is likely to get seriously injured.
Oh. So, some rabbits are more likely than others to show aggressive behaviours towards other rabbits or towards humans. And the predisposing factors for aggressive behaviours in these two situations are quite different.
So a rabbit that shows aggressive behaviour towards rabbits does not, is not necessarily any more likely to show aggressive behaviours towards humans. So let's start by thinking about aggressive behaviours between rabbits. They're more likely to show aggressive behaviours towards another rabbit if they don't know the other rabbit.
Rabbits are intensely territorial, as you well know, which is why unfamiliar rabbits need to be introduced in a very specific way. Unneutered rabbits are more likely to be aggressive towards another rabbit because of sexual competition or sexual frustration. Rabbits in pain are more likely to show aggressive behaviours generally, because they, their ability to escape is compromised, and so they're more likely to show those defensive behaviours earlier in their fight or flight response to protect themselves.
And finally, rabbits in single sex pairs are more likely to show aggressive behaviours towards each other, even if both are neutered, because interestingly, in rabbits, both the reproductive organs and the adrenal glands both produce significant quantities of sex hormones. And this means that even when the sex organs are removed during neutering, the rabbit still has quite a lot of sex-specific hormones in its body. So they continue to have sex-specific motivations, even when neutered, to a lesser extent, but two rabbits of the same sex are more likely to try to compete for the same resources.
So those are rabbits that show aggressive behaviour towards other rabbits. Let's think now about rabbits that show aggressive behaviours towards humans. So rabbits in pain, of course, same reasons as before.
But also rabbits that are often picked up. Picking up rabbits causes substantial stress, and rabbits that are often picked up quite often learn behaviours to stop this happening. Rabbits kept on their own and also more likely to show aggressive behaviours, perhaps because they have less ability to cope with fearful situations, which leads them to develop aggressive coping strategies.
And finally, female rabbits and neutered male rabbits are more likely to show human directed aggressive behaviours than are entire males. So let's talk about how we can work out why a rabbit is showing aggressive behaviour. So this is the diagram that I showed you earlier.
We know there are many different motivations, but how do we actually differentiate between these different motivations in practise? What we need to do is to collect enough information to work it out. And this is the same process as any veterinary consultation.
We look at the characteristics of the rabbit. We ask the owners about the rabbit's history. We do a full clinical examination.
The only difference is that we then also examine the behaviour. Looking at the characteristics of the rabbit, the breed, sex, and neuter status can give us some indications for motivations. For example, lop-eared rabbits have compromised hearing and frequent ear disease.
This may cause pain and reduce their ability to predict interactions with people. In the history, we need to learn if there is any medical history that might affect the rabbit's behaviour. We need to understand how the rabbit is kept, its environment, companionship, and it's diet.
We need to find out about the rabbit's interactions, how they interact, with whom, and whether or not they're frequently picked up. And then for the clinical examination. In this, we're looking for any signs of pain or disease that would reduce the rabbit's ability to cope with stresses and increase its likelihood of showing aggressive behaviour.
Check for the obvious ones, dental problems and ear problems, but perform a full clinical exam to rule out medical causes. If we can't find an obvious source of pain, but we're still suspicious that pain might be playing a role here, we might try a week-long course of a pain relieving drug. However, pain usually just exacerbates a response that is caused by a different stressor.
So even if we do identify a medical cause, we should continue to explore the motivations for the aggressive behaviour. In the behavioural examination, we want to understand more about the behaviour, how frequently it occurs, what triggers it, what the outcome of the behaviour is, who the rabbit shows the behaviour to, and what the owner wants to happen, what they think is a good, a good, desirable outcome. And we also want to check what the owner has previously tried to resolve the problem.
Videos of the behaviour are extremely useful to understand the immediate context of the behaviour. So if you, if you know that you're going to be approached by an owner with this sort of problem, do encourage them to film it and bring, bring it to show you. And from that information, you should be able to work out the motivation.
Aggression towards another animal related to feed, most likely resource protection. Aggression when a rabbit is picked up, likely fear or frustration. Aggression that doesn't seem to fit with another motivation, probably territorial.
Check if the rabbits also spraying urine or scent marking during the, the aggressive interactions. OK, so hopefully, you, once you've done this, you'll have an idea of what the motivation can be. We can then, once you've understood what the motivation is, we can then work on out, we can then work on reducing it.
I find it quite useful to think about any behaviour using the antecedent behaviour consequence model, the ABC model. A behaviour arises because it's use in a specific situation, the antecedent, gives a desirable outcome, the consequence. Let's take an example of an aggressive behaviour and put it through this model.
Polly is a rabbit who lives in a hutch. Her owner has to pick her up to take her out of the hutch. She feels stressed when she's picked up.
Initially, she tries to freeze, but the owner catches her, then she tries to run away, but the owner corners her and picks her up. Then she tries biting her owner, and the owner retreats. Pauly has learned then in a situation where the owner is trying to catch her, the antecedent, she can show aggressive behaviour, and the owner stops trying to catch her, the consequence.
So when we're thinking about a behaviour, we need to ask ourselves three questions. Can we change the antecedent situation? Can we change the behaviour, and can we change the response?
Let's start by thinking about changing the response. Now much of the owners that, well, much of the owners, much of the advice that owners find online about resolving aggressive behaviour, focuses on this category of interventions. Broadly, there are two major ways to change your response to reduce the incidence of a behaviour.
You can either ignore the behaviour and hope the rabbit learns that the aggressive behaviour has no effect, or you can punish the rabbit and hope it learns that the aggressive behaviour doesn't get a good good outcome. Each of these approaches has problems. Let's think about ignoring behaviour.
What does that actually actually look like? Owers might follow online guidance such as wear gloves when picking the rabbit up, or even train yourself not to flinch. Who are we superhumans?
That the idea behind these pieces of advice is that if the rabbit learns that the aggressive behaviour isn't effective, it will stop showing the behaviour. So what's the problem? The problem is that a rabbit has to be very stressed to show aggressive behaviour at all.
Showing the rabbit that its behaviour is not effective has two consequences. Either the rabbit will learn that it needs to be more aggressive to get the outcome it wants, or it will learn that it cannot avoid a very stressful situation. And this leads to a state called learned helplessness, which has certain similarities to the human state of depression.
Rabbits showing learned helplessness no longer try to avoid really unpleasant situations. So what does punishing the behaviour look like? Punishing the behaviour looks like tapping the rabbit on the nose or making a high pitched squealing noise that bites you.
If the rabbit is stressed enough to show aggressive behaviour, increasing its stress by hurting or surprising it is only gonna further damage its relationship with its owner and increase the likelihood of future aggressive behaviour. When a rabbit shows aggressive behaviour, it is stressed. It usually has also tried non-aggressive behaviours to resolve the situation and has learned that they haven't worked.
This means that it's much more effective to prevent the behaviour occurring in the first place, rather than trying to respond differently to change it once it's already occurred. So Can we change the situation? Couple of ways of doing this.
We can restructure the environment and we can change our own interactions with the rabbit. We need to do this so we can manage the rabbit in a way that prevents it ever needing to show aggressive behaviour. We need to be able to avoid the key triggers, and this means changing the context of our interactions.
And how can we change the behaviour? First, we need to prevent the rabbit ever showing aggressive behaviour. And this is really important because the more times that the rabbit performs their behaviour, the more habitu it becomes and the harder it is to change.
And how do we prevent the rabbit showing the aggressive behaviours? We learn and respond to the behavioural cues it gives before it shows the aggressive behaviours. When we respond to more subtle cues, the rabbit learns that it doesn't need to show aggressive behaviour to get the outcome it wants.
We do also want to help the rabbit to feel less stressed by any stresses that we can't completely eliminate. And there are a couple of things we can do here. We can use a process called desensitisation and counter-conditioning, which helps the rabbit feel more positive about a situation, or we can train an incompatible behaviour, which gives the rabbit something else to do, which is more rewarding.
So as I said, when we think about changing the rabbit's situation to reduce aggressive behaviour, we can think about either changing its physical environment or its interactions with people. And this is really important because owners need to be able to manage the rabbit without ever having to pick the rabbit up or to interact with it in a way that causes stress. The most important thing about a rabbit's physical environment is that it has a hutch or cage with permanent access to a large exercise space.
When the hutch or cage is separate, the rabbit's welfare suffers for two reasons. It can't move around as it needs to, and it's dependent on being picked up by the owners to be moved to its exercise area. Interactions with owners can also be a source of stress.
Owners need to learn how to interact with rabbits in a way that's good for the owner and good for the rabbit. This means stroking the rabbits when they're soliciting affection, when they come over and put their head down. It means creating environments that enable them to show exploratory behaviours that are fun to watch, and it means hand feeding them and rewarding desired behaviours.
When owners need to handle rabbits, such as for health checks, they need to find ways of doing these that do not cause stress to the rabbit. So we've talked about setting up the environment to allow us to change the rabbit's behaviour, but usually this isn't enough on its own. When a rabbit has learned that aggressive behaviour can work, it may try in different circumstances.
And this means that it's very important to learn the behavioural signs that indicate increasing stress, or the situational triggers that cause stress and diffuse the situation. We want to avoid increasing the rabbit's fear and distress by either persevering with an action that the rabbit finds unpleasant or by punishing the rabbit's behavioural expression of stress. Once we've understood what the rabbit finds unpleasant or stressful, we can start to deliberately modify certain behavioural responses to better help the rabbit cope with these situations.
We either try to desensitise the rabbit to the unpleasant stimulus or we train an alternative behaviour that gives the rabbit a way of improving its situation. Let's talk about desensitisation. Desensitisation is the process by which an animal becomes less sensitive to a stimulus that it has previously been sensitive to.
What we have to do is to expose the rabbit to the stimulus it finds stressful. But very importantly, the stimulus needs to be at an extremely low level, so the rabbit doesn't feel like it needs to react. Once the rabbit is calm and relaxed with a very low level stimulus, you gradually increase the intensity of the stimulus, providing the rabbit stays relaxed.
If the rabbit is used to being fed by hand, you can also do a process called counter-conditioning, where you help the rabbit associate the previously stressful stimulus with a more pleasurable one. So as when the rabbit is exposed to the low-level stimulus, you give it some food from your hands, so it associates the previously stressful stimulus with getting food. The other option is to substitute a different response to train an alternative behaviour.
If the rabbit has learned that aggressive behaviour prevents a bad outcome, you can train the rabbit to do a behaviour that actually gets a reward in the same situation. So they can do a different behaviour and get an even better outcome. This can be very effective, but only if the rabbit is not too stressed, so he's actually able to learn, and is familiar with being trained, because it can be very hard for rabbits to learn when they feel really stressed.
Let's think about an example because it it can be a little bit hard to think about these in the abstract. Let's imagine we've got a long-haired rabbit who growls and bites the owner when the owner tries to brush it. To desensitise the rabbit to the process of being groomed, the owner needs to desensitise the rabbit to the brush, to the contact over its body, and they need to find a way of managing the rabbit with as little restraint as possible, because physical restraint undermines the rabbit's trust in its owner.
So you can see at this point when we're desensitising, we're thinking about all of the stressful aspects of a situation, we're working out how we can break them up so we can help the rabbit cope with low levels of all of those individual pieces first. So the owner might start by leaving the brush in different places initially, so the rabbit becomes familiar with it. They might start counterconditioning by giving the rabbit food rewards when it sniffs the brush on the floor, and then sniffing the brush in the owner's hand.
They may give food rewards after doing single strokes down the rabbit's back with their hand, and then with the back of the brush, and then with the front of the brush. They can then gradually escalate the amount of brushing they do, while continuing to reward the rabbit for remaining calm. So that's a desensitisation approach.
We could also think about response substitution. So what we've got at the moment, we've got a rabbit that's learned that when it bites the owner, the brushing stops. We want to train an alternative behaviour.
We can consider different rewards rewards. We can use food rewards as we did with the previous example, or we can even use stopping brushing if the owner's willing to do lots of small grooming sessions rather than one big one. We might train the rabbit to hop up on a chair for its food and grooming together, gradually escalating the brushing as I've just described, but allowing the rabbit to choose to tolerate the unpleasant sensation in exchange for food rewards, to, to have a location where it knows what's going to happen, and to choose to go up there because the, the reward of the food outweighs the unpleasant sensation of being brushed.
So there are some similarities between these two approaches. Both can change aggressive behaviours, providing that you can get the stimulus to a sufficiently low level that the rabbit doesn't react. Now, this example also raises some other questions, so I'm gonna talk about that very briefly.
There are various ethical challenges and welfare problems with long-haired rabbits, and that's why some rescue centres no longer rehome them at all. Regular grooming is necessary to prevent mats, which are really uncomfortable, but the grooming itself can cause pain and discomfort, especially if you're trying to remove mats, or if the, if the brush is hurting the skin. And this regular grooming can really undermine the rabbit human relationship.
It usually requires restraint, and it requires contact with parts of the rabbits that are never contacted during normal interactions, such as under the belly and around the tail. So actually, if I was dealing with this case, yes, I could certainly give advice on how to help the rabbit tolerate brushing better. But we should also look at how you change the situation so the rabbit doesn't need to show, doesn't need to be stressed like that.
So infrequent clipping under sedation may be more humane than persevering with with regular grooming in a rabbit that finds the process as stressful and painful. So we can think about changing the behaviour, but often we really need to think about changing the antecedent situation as well. OK, let's finally, let's have a look at some specific situations and think about what appropriate behaviour modification in those situations looks like to try to reduce aggressive behaviour.
So many instances of aggression in rabbits have an underlying fear motivation. Humans are naturally predators of rabbits, and we do a lot of behaviours that are very stressful for a prey species. We're loud, we move fast, and we try to pick rabbits up.
Now, those of you who've seen some of my previous talks will know that I often talk about this, but it's hard for humans to understand just how stressful it is for an animal without hands to be picked up. Think about it. We humans have hands.
As babies, we're picked up frequently by our parents' hands for love and affection. As we develop, we explore the world through our hands, and physical contact with other humans is often through our hands. Therefore, we often assume that picking up an animal can convey affection or reassurance.
But if that animal doesn't have hands, it doesn't have any of those good experiences of being picked up. Additionally, if it's a prey species or just a small species, it's got a very strong evolutionary reason to try to avoid being picked up by a large predator. Being picked up is very stressful for rabbits and is one of the key causes of fear-based aggression towards humans.
So what do owners do to reduce fear-based aggression? The key is to reduce the fear. This may come from desensitisation and counter-conditioning, but it is much more likely to come from changing the situation or the interactions.
Does the owner have to pick up the rabbit to move it between its hutch and exercise area? Connect the two. Have a larger enclosure, or connect the different parts with mesh tunnels.
Does the owner pick up the rabbit to give it affection? Help the owner find ways of interacting with their rabbit that are mutually rewarding, hand feeding the rabbit, providing interesting environments for it to explore, training the rabbit, or rewarding the rabbit for jumping onto their lap. Rebuilding trusts can take a while, but if the owners can find a way to avoid the fear-inducing situations, most rabbits will reduce their expression of aggressive behaviours pretty quickly.
Let's talk about pain. Pain can cause sudden changes in behaviour. So if you have an older rabbit who suddenly starts showing aggressive behaviours when nothing in its environment has changed, then an underlying painful condition should be the first thing to rule out.
Pain can be really hard to assess in rabbits. I've already discussed a couple of different ways of diagnosing pain when I was talking about the the clinical exam. If the rabbit is thought to be in pain, the painful condition needs to be treated or at least pain relief needs to be provided before you try to change the rabbit's behaviour.
Even once the pain is adequately controlled, you may need to use some of the desensitisation or response substitution techniques, because if a rabbit has experienced pain during certain interactions, it will feel more fearful of those interactions, and so the rabbit will need to learn again that the interactions can be pleasurable. Territorial aggression is usually fairly easy to diagnose. It can get a little bit tricky if the rabbit only shows territorial aggression under certain circumstances, so there's a pattern, such as in a specific area of the run, when the owner is wearing specific clothes or even has a certain smell.
So I've seen it in, in, In, owners where the, they were they were handling another pet beforehand, or if the companion rabbit is in a certain location. So look for a rabbit that's showing aggressive behaviour, but doesn't look particularly fearful. So, if we think back to that video we saw earlier, a rabbit with its tail up, perhaps circling or spraying, and territorial behaviour, they often look like they're, they're sort of taking their time a little bit in performing the behaviour.
It's not quite as desperate as, as a fear-based aggression. Now territorial aggression can be really frustrating to resolve because I often need to enter the rabbit's enclosure to give them food, to clean them out, etc. And this impedes the process of desensitisation and counter-conditioning because the stimulus isn't always at a low enough level to prevent the rabbit from showing the behaviour.
And because of this, you'll need to do some form of environmental change alongside changing the interactions to try to reduce the stress as much as possible. So options might be perhaps the owner can find a different way to clean the enclosure. So if they feed the rabbits in a certain area and block off their access and line of sight to the areas that are being cleaned, the rabbit's not going to have that kind of acute territorial stress feeling.
Perhaps the owner can change the position of certain aspects within the enclosure, move the litter trays so they don't need to go in as far, provide new places to hide, change the angle of the shelter, just set the environment up a little bit differently, so you can start to re-establish new behaviours in a new context. But in addition to environmental modifications, the owners should also think about how they can change their interactions to change the rabbit's motivations. Training rabbits is really, really useful here because it can help change their perspective of their owner.
So the owner stops being a threat to be guarded against and instead becomes a resource to be valued. So start by calling the rabbit over to give it food at the edge of the enclosure, then move to different places and call it again and reward it every time it comes over. And this way, the rabbit becomes used to coming over in the hope of finding food, rather than in the hope of making the owner withdraw.
If there's a space in which the rabbit does not attack the owner, they can, they might consider training the rabbit to hop on a raised platform or chair or to touch its nose to a target. Anything that enables it to get rewards at a slight distance from the owner. Once the behaviour is established and the rabbit reliably performs the behaviour on command, then the owner can start requesting the behaviour in situations in which the rabbit often shows territorial behaviour.
So a rabbit that is sitting on a chair near the entrance of the of the enclosure can't also be biting the rabbit, the owner's feet at the same time. Territorial aggression can be quite challenging to resolve because the motivation is very strong. It's typically quite intrinsic to the rabbit rather than caused by the owner, like fear based aggression.
And the rewards to the rabbit of making the owner withdraw are immediate and strong. And it can be hard for owners to avoid some of the situations that stimulate territorial aggression. However, if owners can make a series of changes and really dedicate some time to training the rabbits, most owners will see an improvement.
Finally, let's cover food related aggression. Rabbits with food-related aggression usually growl or lunge at the owner when the owner tries to move the food bowl or put food into the food bowl. Now food-related aggression arises because we feed rabbits in a way for which they're not evolved.
Rabbits in the wild have continuous access to a lot of low energy density food that grows over a very large area. Look at the image on this slide. We often feed pet rabbits intermittently on very palatable, high energy density food from a small bowl.
And this unnatural way of feeding creates abnormal perception of competition, and it's a major cause of food-related aggression. This means that the way to resolve food-related aggression is fairly straightforward. Remove the bowl and help the rabbits to perform more normal behaviours around food.
This means plenty of ad-lib hay around the enclosure. When leafy greens or pellets are fed, they should be scattered into the hay to stimulate those normal foraging behaviours and reduce the rabbit's focus on a single location for that resource. Some owners actually decide to to remove scatter feeding or, or concentrate feeding almost at all, and they can actually just hand feed the rabbits with pellets rather than scattering them.
And this also will help them to start training their rabbit, start training their rabbits if they, if they want to. Food-related aggression is usually quick to resolve once the food environment is changed. If cases are very severe, it can be worth gradually reducing and then stopping the pellet feeding entirely for a few weeks to motivate more normal grazing and foraging behaviours on good quality hay, and then reintroducing the pellets, either by scattering them in the hay or by hand feeding them.
Obviously, when we're changing diet and rabbit, it's very, very important that this is done very slowly over a couple of weeks to avoid gastrointestinal upset. So, we're almost at the end of this webinar. I'm just gonna reiterate the key points again.
Fundamentally, aggression both indicates and causes significant welfare problems in rabbits. Rabbits are aggressive when their welfare is poor, and rabbit to human aggression causes breakdown of the human animal bond. To manage aggression, try to change the rabbit's motivation and reinforce incompatible behaviours.
So, if you have any questions that I can help you with, please email within 7 days of the live stream, and I'll get back to you as soon as I can. Additionally, my email address is on the front slide of this webinar, so please feel free to get in touch if you have a challenging case that you'd like to discuss. Thank you very much for joining.
I hope now you feel a little bit better able to deal with aggressive rabbit. Thank you.