Good evening everybody and welcome to a Thursday night members webinar. My name is Bruce Stevenson and I have the pleasure of chairing tonight's webinar. So tonight's presenter is Gwen Bradbury, and she's a vet who runs a tele consultancy to help rabbit owners, vets, and vet nurses with behavioural problems in rabbits.

Her textbook on the subject titled behavioural Problems in Rabbits, A Clinical Approach, explores the different aspects of rabbit behaviour, discusses communication behaviours, describes how rabbits learn to change behaviour, and has detailed specific guidelines on approaches to common clinical behavioural problems. She is the veterinary advisor for the RWAF's Rabbiting on magazine, an honorary fellow of the University of Edinburgh, and she lectures on the Cambridge vet course. So Gwen, welcome to the webinar vet and it's over to you.

Thank you very much, Bruce. It's lovely to talk to you all today. I want to talk about a subject that's really close to my heart, although obviously quite niche, it's about handling of rabbits.

And I'm talking very specifically today about rabbits being picked up. So handling as a term means to feel or manipulate with the hands, and it encompasses stroking, scratching, health checking, but also picking up. And I'm really gonna focus on that today.

But, I'd like to just start with the story. So once upon a time in 2011, I inherited a rabbit. And he was small, he was grey, he was very cute, and he absolutely hated me.

When I tried to catch him to put him in his run, he bit me. When I tried to give him a cuddle, he scratched me, and when I wanted to stroke him, he ran away. And he hated my boyfriend even more.

Now, this is quite surprising to me because I was doing everything right. I, I, I'd owned a rabbit before. I knew how to interact with rabbits.

You know, dogs you play with on the floor, horses, you hold them by a head collar and you stroke them, and rabbits you pick up to play with. You need to pick them up because you need to get them used to being moved around. You need to check their health, and you need to pet them.

And I knew that I needed to keep picking him up, gently but firmly, until he understood that he should be picked up. But it didn't work. And after a couple of months, I could barely get near him, and so I had to find a different approach.

So I read as much as I could on rabbit behaviour. Needless to say, there wasn't an awful lot available. But I've been interested in rabbit behaviour throughout university, and I've taken every opportunity I had to learn more.

So I applied the same principles to him. I started off just by trying to improve his welfare, so I bonded him to another rabbit, and I started clicker training. And things started to change.

He was much happier with his rabbit friend. And once he started coming to a whistle, going into his bed when I asked him to, and leaving the room on command, I no longer needed to pick him up. And that was really the point that his behaviour towards me started to change completely.

He started coming over, putting his head down to be straight. He'd follow me from room to room, and he'd sleep by my feet. And I thought, hm, this is really interesting because this is not what I thought.

And so I started reading up in the academic literature. About, this, the stress and the, the, experience of rabbits when they are picked up by humans. A lot of that actually is in the laboratory animal rabbit literature, not in the pet animal literature, but there is enough in the pet in the pet rabbit literature to, to make it clear that I, I was on the right track.

And so once I'd had a look and I'd got all this information, I thought, you know, there must be other people in the same situation as me. And so I set up a teleconsultancy. So I had a website, had a YouTube channel and I asked people just to get in touch.

And. People really did get in touch. I had a lot of requests for help, and it, it became clear that it wasn't just my rabbit, that actually, when people were repeated, repeatedly picking up their rabbits, in normal daily life, it was much, much harder for them to have a trusting relationship and a rabbit that wanted to spend time around them.

And so. I wrote a number of articles, both in the veterinary academic literature in, places like Vet Times, and then a publisher got in touch and asked if I would, would write a book. And so that's the sort of evolution of my understanding of rabbit behaviour.

But very crucially, the, the, the, the reason that I got so interested in it was observing that, that rabbits didn't seem to like being picked up. And so what I want to talk about today is the following areas. I want to talk about what rabbits like, why they like this, and how we know.

I want to talk about how we can reduce fear of handling, so being picked up when we have, because sometimes we do have to pick up rabbits. I want to talk about how we can reduce handling and how we can handle better. So let's start by thinking about what rabbits like and how we know, and that will help us to understand why they dislike certain experiences.

So fundamentally rabbits have 3 major drives. They want to avoid being eaten, and this is because they form the main source of prey for more than 30 different species in their native habitat. This means that they are very conscious of the need to avoid being eaten.

They, they also want to be able to escape from unpleasant situations to avoid being eaten, and they want to live with other rabbits because there are more eyes and ears to be alert for danger, and there's a lower, lower risk that they specifically will be the one to be eaten. So that motivation really supersedes all of the other motivations. It's absolutely crucial that they're not consumed.

After that, they want to be able to graze and browse, they want to be able to reproduce, but in general, rabbits dislike things that humans do because they feel that they may be in danger of being eaten. Now, There's a very good reason for rabbits to fear humans, but it can be a little bit hard for owners to realise that their pet may be scared of them for this reason. If we kind of compare rabbits to dogs, it can be easy to see why people struggle to understand this.

And that's because we're very familiar with dogs, but dogs are a really very special case. Dogs have been selected to have a dependence on humans, so they forgive minor mistakes on human parts. They really want to follow people, and we find it much easier to understand their behaviour just instinctively.

Now, many people do pick up small dogs, and while not all dogs enjoy being picked up, typically they tolerate it fairly well, and it doesn't affect the relationship between the owner and the dog. But rabbits are very different. And so let's understand why this is.

Firstly, humans on average are predators of rabbits. More people in the world eat rabbits than own them as pets. And so this means that wild rabbits have been strongly selected to avoid humans at all costs.

And you might think that maybe we bred that fear out of rabbits when we domesticated them, but we only domesticated them really very recently. To put it in perspective, dogs were domesticated maybe 40,000 to 100,000 years ago. Cats, maybe 12,000 years ago.

Rabbits about 1000 years ago. And that's really pretty recent. Dogs have really co-evolved alongside humans and they've been selected for psychological dependence on humans, but this is just not the case with rabbits.

The relationship between a human and a rabbit is very different from that between a human and a dog. And then, OK, they've been they have been domesticated for 1000 years, haven't we, haven't we tried to select them to be, less fearful of, of us? But although they've been domesticated for that long, rabbits haven't really been selected for behaviour.

Initially they were selected for meat quality, the big rabbits, or for pelt quality, the furry rabbits. And then for appearance, for showings of the small short-nosed rabbits. But behaviour was selected for pretty incidentally.

Rabbits that were able to cope with close proximity to humans were more likely to survive. Tameness has been, has not really been a deliberate choice in our selection. So All that said, rabbits and humans can have very good relationships, but these need to be founded on trust.

The relationship can be improved if the rabbit has been well socialised, when it was very young. And the more positive experiences the rabbit have, has with a human, the less fearful the rabbit is and the more rewarding the relationship is with the with the owner. So some of the relation, some of the interactions, as I said, between rabbits and humans make them feel scared, and so they trigger the rabbit's motivation to avoid being eaten.

And this means that the behaviours that the rabbit shows are often driven by adrenaline, so the fright, flight and fight responses. Rabbits have really very conserved responses to fearful stimuli, and we can model this using the stress escalation ladder. And this is a modified version to to show the sort of behaviours that rabbits show as their adrenaline levels and their stress increase.

So, initially, right at the bottom, at the very first sign of danger, a rabbit will freeze. At this point, it feels that the danger is sufficiently far away that it does not pose a threat, providing the rabbit doesn't attract attention to itself. Often this state in rabbit rabbits is known as anxiety rather than overt fear.

But if this freeze anxiety behaviour isn't effective and the threat intensifies, the rabbit will try to escape from the threat by retreating or running away. Then, if the rabbit is cornered and cannot escape, then it will start to show aggressive behaviours to defend itself. A very common a common reason for rabbits to experience fear and anxiety during interactions with humans is when they're picked up.

And that's why typically when we see these, these behaviours, these kind of aggressive behaviours in rabbits, they are usually linked to owners that are trying to pick the rabbits up. So let's think about why owners might pick up rabbits. You can see there are various reasons.

People do it for purely logistical reasons. They do it to ensure the rabbit's health. They do it to provide emotional support to the rabbit and to receive emotional support for themselves.

But there's a bit of a problem here because there's a mismatch between what the rabbit needs and what the owner needs. And one of the kind of simple rules to, to think about when we're thinking about whether an animal likes being picked up by a human, is to think about whether the, the animal has hands. And that sounds a little bit simplistic, but bear with me.

If an animal has hands itself, then it's likely to have been picked up by its parents or family members when it was small, right? So it was picked up to show attention. We have grabby monkey hands, we're picked up by our parents and we like picking things up.

We think that they are also going to enjoy being picked up. But rabbits don't have hands. The only time that something picks a rabbit up of another species, it's when it wants to eat them.

And this difference, this mismatch causes a lot of stress in that owner rabbit relationship. And let's think about what a rabbit experiences when it's picked up. There's various evidence that rabbits dislike being picked up.

And one study of pet rabbits, for example, found that in those rabbits that were picked, that were frequently picked up, even if they didn't show any fear or aggressive behaviours when they were picked up, they were still significantly less likely to voluntarily approach the owner. And the authors hypothesised that this decreased willingness to approach was because the rabbits were trying to avoid situations where they might be lifted. And this is really important because frequently owners will say, you know, my rabbit is fine being picked up.

No, I think he likes it, never shows any problems. But actually, he might not be approaching the owner very much and that still will affect that owner's relationship and may actually make the owner even more likely to pick the rabbit up to get some form of of of good interaction there. So the majority of of fear and aggression problems in rabbits stem from being picked up.

And just to make it very clear, what feels normal to humans can feel very, very different to the rabbits. And I want to clarify one thing here, and that's the importance of a feeling of control in for an animal's welfare. If a rabbit jumps into a into the owner's lap or onto the owner's knee, that rabbit is making a choice.

It's very different from being restrained and picked up. We'll talk about this a little bit more in a minute when I talk about how we can pick rabbits up in a better way. I'm only talking about situations where the rabbit doesn't have a choice.

OK, so I've hopefully made it quite clear that rabbits don't like being picked up, but we need to pick rabbits up sometimes. So how can we improve the situation? There are 2 things we can do.

We can either reduce the fear by selective breeding or socialisation, or we can reduce the handling. Let's explore these in a little bit more detail. So There are 2 things that breeders can do and 2 things that owners can do.

Breeders can breed calmer rabbits and can handle very young rabbits. Owners can train their rabbits and they can keep them in ways where they don't need to be picked up. So, to help the general rabbit population become less and less stressed around humans, breeders should deliberately breed rabbits that are calm and relaxed about people.

We know that tameness has a genetic component, so we could have a situation where the whole of the pet rabbit population was becoming more and more relaxed around humans and therefore easier to handle. There are obviously challenges with this approach, but certainly if people are breeding rabbits and you have any ability to influence that, then you can recommend that they do breed for temperament. So how, how else can we reduce fear?

We can, we can advise breeders to actually handle those baby rabbits, even if the rabbits don't have the genetic profile that increases the likelihood they will tolerate handling, we can alter their epigenetic profile by handling them as babies. So breeders should start as soon as the, the rabbits are born. Initially just by distracting the dough with food outside, rubbing soil bedding on their hands to introduce the, to, to make sure that they smell like the nests, and then they can just open the nest very, very carefully to count the babies.

Let the baby settle before closing it again and do this every day, it will start to get them used to human sense in a in a a very low stress way. If the doe is very nervous, there is a risk that she might injure the injure the, baby rabbits. So if she is very nervous, you can leave her outside of the nest for an hour or so until the, the, the baby rabbits are fully settled.

This is acceptable because in the wild, actually baby rabbits only feed for about 5 minutes in every 24 hour period. And so once the breeders have started to get that scent introduced at about 10 to 12 days, they can start picking the babies up for a couple of seconds. In the morning when they've just fed, so they're quite sleepy.

Once the eyes are open, they can start stroking the rabbits very gently and positive contact should be continued until they're taken to their new homes. So we've talked about what breeders can do. Breeders can breed calmer rabbits and can handle very young rabbits.

Owners can train their rabbits and can keep them in ways where they don't need to be picked up. And this means connecting parts of the rabbit's environment, letting the rabbit choose how it interacts, and training the rabbit to do what's needed. And one of the really key things to do then is to make sure that there is no reason that you have to, that you just have to pick the rabbits up to move them between a hutch and a run, for example.

That's because when you have to do something like that on a daily basis, even if you're putting the rabbit somewhere that you think it wants to go. You cannot give the rabbit enough time to accustom to handling in between those periods, so you're forced to act a couple of times a day. And you can't avoid it because the rabbits, in order to give the rabbit a good good welfare and enough space, you need to be, moving them between those two spaces.

So it's, there are lots of options. This, this, this image on the screen shows a tunnel from Runaround, which is a company that makes tunnels that can. You can just install into mesh or into sheds to connect that space.

There are some excellent mesh tunnels, and actually, even cat flaps can be a really good way of connecting sheds and gardens, or even, you know, a house in the garden. Rabbits can be quite easily trained to use that cat flap, and you can have a microchip, cat flap, and a microchip rabbit. So you can have, something that is fairly secure.

But thinking very creatively about how you reduce the need to actually logistically move the rabbit is a very important first step to to reducing the handling as much as you can. Now the second point I want to make is the importance of letting the rabbit choose how it interacts. Many people sort of inflict affection on their pets.

So they, they try and stroke the rabbit when it's doing something else, for example, or because they're a little bit worried that the rabbit might bite them, they, they carefully keep their hands well above the rabbit's head so they can, they can touch it on the top of their heads. But this can trigger quite a fear, a defensive response. If you look at this picture, consider how you would feel in this situation.

You know, the hand of a predator coming down from above is silhouetted against the bright sky. You're an animal with eyes that are positioned towards the top of its head to keep an eye out for aerial predators. This is quite a fearful sort of interaction.

So let's consider what this sort of interaction feels like. The, the hand is now on the same level as you, it's very easily visible and importantly, it replicates normal interactions between rabbits. And in a minute, I'm going to show you a series of images that show how rabbits interact themselves and how humans can replicate the normal face to face interaction that rabbits expect of a positive social interaction.

So this sort of interaction with a rabbit, putting your hand towards them at their level and letting them choose whether or not they want to interact. This shows a rabbit that you're considering its needs as well as your own. You're making an offer and the rabbit has a choice.

So what is the behaviour that you're replicating? This is how rabbits choose to interact. If you look at the top image, what rabbits tend to do, if one of them wants to be groomed, it will typically lower its head and move it towards the other rabbit.

The other rabbit then has a choice. It can either lick the head of the rabbit, as you can see the the rabbit on the right is doing, or it can actually put its own nose underneath the, the, the nose of the rabbit that has requested it. And based on the hierarchy between the rabbit and rabbits and the situation at that time, one rabbit will normally then default to grooming the other.

So these images show this image, these images show a very easy way for owners to start giving their rabbits a choice about how they interact. Humans can offer that interaction, if the rabbit lowers its head, the owners can stroke it on the face. So let's have a look at what this looks like in practise.

OK, so, here I'm I'm wanting to know this rabbit wants to be straight, so I can cross my hand at a low level as though I'm another rabbit. The other rabbit duck, the other rabbit, I'm not a rabbit. The rabbit ducks his head.

I can then stroke him on the, on the, on the face, and then I can lower my own hand, and he sometimes will reciprocate the favour. And this is a very balanced sort of interaction. And this is a rabbit that is very trusting.

When you are starting this process, it's, it's not a it's not common that the rabbit will groom you back. So we've talked about the importance of securely connecting spaces, and we've talked about letting the rabbit choose how it interacts. The final component of this is about training the rabbit to do what you need it to do.

And typically when we think about training an animal, we think about training it to do tricks. But I would say that the most important reason that we should train an animal is to allow it to cope with the environment that we keep it in. And that is about helping it to to navigate the space, helping it to do what we need it to do without us having to force it to do that, and to help it help us ensure that we can take care of its health.

And so There are a couple of things that are really important to train a rabbit to do. Some of these are, the first thing you need to do to train a rabbit is to get the rabbit used to taking food from your hand. Once you have that that behaviour in place, you can then start to to train a variety of different behaviours.

I want to talk a little bit about health checks and how training and how respect for the rabbit's needs should inform how we do health checks. We used to tell owners, if we were, when we were advising them about rabbit health, we used to tell the owners to give a full health check of the rabbit every week. And this typically involved lifting the rabbit up and turning it over to us, to look at its, underside, to look around its external genitalia, to make sure that it didn't have crusted faeces, urine scalding, or, or, or fly strike.

But the problem with this, in a very practical, at a very practical level, is that the rabbits, when they're frequently exposed to this very stressful stimulus, stop, eventually stop trusting the owner because the experience is very unpleasant. When you have this breakdown in trust, you may have a rabbit that is harder to pick up, you may have a rabbit that starts showing more aggression, but, or, or a rabbit that just starts running away from the owners. And actually this then causes, this then shows that the human animal bond has broken down.

Now, it's really important that that the owners of animals have a good bond with their animal, because it motivates them to be more aware of the rabbit's welfare, to be more more considerate of the rabbit's health, and more likely to seek veterinary attention if there is a problem. So as vets, we really need to make sure that that human animal, we're not, our advice is not compromising that human animal bond. But we obviously need to strike a balance between the rabbit having good enough health that we can spot problems early and we can act on them.

But while we, while we don't, while we make sure that we're not causing that bond to break down, so you want to do a good health check without causing that bond to break down. And we can do, we can assess different things. So daily, what we want to assess.

Is the, the things that could cause death in a very short time scale. So these are things around food and water intake because rabbits that don't eat or drink very quickly get ill. We want to check that they are moving, they are able to move and they are moving comfortable comfortably.

We want to check for lesions or wounds. We want to check for faecal pellets and specifically that there are not a lot of seotrophs left around, which might indicate that the rabbit is not able to, consume those seotrophs, and that can lead to, to gut problems. And we want to make sure that that rabbit isn't soiled, isn't soiled to a level that that flies may land.

And there are various ways we can do that. We can train the rabbit to stand on its hind legs, as I showed you earlier, holding the food up, getting the rabbit to put its paws up. But actually we can get information in other ways.

And one of the really important things to advise owners to do is just get in the habit of knowing what secret troves smell like. And knowing what their rabbit smells like, because when rabbits are soiled with sikotropes or urine, typically they smell really quite strong, and that's, that can be a very good indicator that something is not, is not right. So the daily health check, the daily things we're checking, are the things that indicate disruption to bodily systems that can cause serious disease very quickly.

So that's a daily health check. In terms of the weekly or monthly health check, there are other things that owners should consider. So owners should check how much their rabbits weigh.

Rabbits are very easily trained to hop onto a set of scales for a food reward, and this is, is very easy to do. Owners should try to observe the underside of the rabbit's paws to look for evidence of, of of major podo dermatitis lesions on the soles of the feet. That can usually be done when rabbits are, sitting or lying down with their paws outstretched.

And they should palpate the head, jaw and teeth very thoroughly when they, when they're grooming the rabbit. So when you are feeling around the head of a rabbit that that is, that trusts you, usually it's pretty pleasant for the rabbits for you to rub over the top of, over the top of their head, around their ear bases, and usually along the sides of the, of the, the maxilla and the mandible. As you, as they become more familiar with you, often you can run your, your hands along the rami of the jaws, the bones underneath, and check that you haven't got, molar tooth root, lumps underneath.

And you should be able to get a very good idea of whether there are painful spots in the rabbit on the rabbit's face by whether or not the rabbit recoils. This is usually very acceptable, it's perceived as mutual grooming by the rabbit, so getting in the habit of really doing quite a thorough palpate of the head can be very, very well tolerated. So disease is affecting the aspects of health that I've described, so the, the dental disease, the weight and the podo dermatitis typically are slower in progression, so they don't need to be monitored as frequently.

So we can be much cleverer about how we advise those health checks to be performed. There are other things, you can train, rabbits to do. This was a rabbit that I trained to, dig on a sandpaper block, for example.

So you can, I could get him to file his own claws down so you can prevent you can not have to pick them up to clip their claws. Rabbits that are kept in a, with plenty of space and, some hard, or some, rough textured floors usually can keep their, claws down so you shouldn't need to have frequent claw clipping. If a rabbit does, then actually it can be an indication to look at how you might change that environment to give it access to something that is more likely to keep its claws down.

So I've talked about a number of things we can do, but I'd like to show you a couple of videos now, just to show you what that can look like in practise. And I'm gonna start with a video about how you can reduce handling of indoor rabbits and give you some example of of tricks that it's perfectly possible to, to train rabbits to do to help them to move around your house without you having to, to touch them. Come in, in your beds.

You know Come on You I think about it. Don't be. Come on, let me come.

Out Ouch. Out I think it's, it's good to see that rabbits can be trained to do a number of tricks because we're often a little bit scathing of rabbits. We, we don't see them as being particularly intelligent.

They certainly, you know, much harder to understand than a dog, but actually they can be trained to do an enormous number of different behaviours. In that second clip where they were in the garden, . I taught them, I, I trained a recall just simply to, to be able to get them back inside without having to catch them.

But, my next door neighbour noted that, they were extremely good at keeping the grass down, and he had a, very plentiful lawn and a dislike of lawnmowers. And so he asked if he could actually open the fence so they could do his lawn as well. And so.

You can imagine that a recall from the neighbour's garden needs to be even more solid than a recall from your own. But if you have that behaviour trained, it enables you to manage your rabbits in a completely different way and give them a lot more freedom than if you are relying on going and and capturing them to get them back. So, I've talked about why rabbits don't like being picked up.

I've talked about how we can change the genetics and the epigenetics of the rabbit pet rabbit population to help them cope with handling better. I've talked about how we can reduce handling in various different ways, both in terms of, of health and in terms of management. But finally, I want to talk about how we can handle rabbits better.

And this really is, is, focused more on the owners than in the veterinary surgery. There are, there's a lot of good information. I've done separate talks on this about how to handle rabbits better in the veterinary surgery.

So in this case, I just want to talk about how we can desensitise and train pet rabbits with their owners to tolerate handling better. S one thing, what we can, what, what's important when we're thinking about, helping rabbits cope with being handled, is that we want to be able to give them, some form of choice that will help them to choose whether or not they want to be in the right place, that we can do something that is mildly unpleasant like picking them up and give them a food reward. I'm going to show you a series of images of how we, how we, the sort of stages of picking a rabbit up in a way that is, is fairly acceptable.

This is a small rabbit, obviously, and then I'm going to show you a video of how we can, how we train small rabbits, to do that. And then I'm going to show you a video of a slightly different technique, which might be, it might be easier with rabbits that are bigger. The main thing I'm trying to do with this technique is avoid my hands touching or cupping the feet.

It seems to be that like human contact with the rabbit's feet is especially stressful. So what I'm doing here is I'm picking the rabbit up by applying pressure on its sides. Having tried to train these things, there are certain things that are a lot easier.

And that is why for big rabbits, we use a towel to again avoid the contact of the hands and the rabbit's feet. So, in this, with this, trained behaviour, I give the signal to the rabbit that I want to pick it up, and that is putting my hands, open and flat on each side of it. You can see I'm not touching the rabbit at the moment.

The rabbit can move forward or move backward as it wants. Then, hands on each side and putting a little bit of gentle pressure on, then gently lifting the rabbit off the floor for a couple of seconds and putting it back and putting it back, and then the rabbit gets a reward. Now I'm gonna show you a video of what this looks like in practise, and you can see the, the, the progression of of trainless behaviour.

Mhm. Mhm So you can see that there are let me see if I can move forward, yeah, all right. OK, you can see that.

It's quite possible to train rabbits to be picked up in a way that is not stressful or is certainly the stress for them is outweighed by the prospect of a reward. You can see that the rabbit continually comes back after the, after I've picked him up, so it shows that he is, is not averse to this. He hasn't learnt to avoid me because of it.

How, to, you know, how, how much can you desensitise? You can desensitise them to going in a, a crate, you can desensitise them to being, having the crate lifted up for you know, a couple of seconds and moved around the house. I don't typically desensitise them to being taken in the car, for example.

Simply because that's a whole another level of uncontrollable stress. But certainly just training them to be picked up for a reward can make that interaction much less stressful when it has to happen. The caveat is that because rabbits don't like being picked up, this is a behaviour you have to reinforce very, very frequently because it, otherwise it very quickly goes to extinction.

The rabbit has to really remember that there might be something good at the end of it, for it to want to participate. So that was the technique for handling small rabbits. It helps us to break it down into small steps and to desensitise to get the rabbits used to being handled and counter condition, get them used to receiving a reward when they do the right thing.

Now in this video, I want to show you how you can train larger rabbits to be picked up in a towel. And you can see that we break it, again, break it down into a number of small achievable steps that we can reinforce before we get the rabbit used to being completely lifted in a towel. Boy, well done.

I Yeah Jim OK Yeah And I'm actually writing it. Yeah Because that's just. Yeah Get a Yeah OK, so hopefully that showed you a little bit of how we can break down a, the clicker training process for rabbits, even for something as unpleasant and potentially stressful as being picked up, breaking everything down into really small steps, reinforcing those, and using them to get to the outcome that we want.

No. In conclusion, oh, I need to move. In conclusion, what I've talked about today is I've talked about why rabbits don't like being handled.

I've talked about what, how we know they don't like being handled, how we can address that, both by the breeders and by the owners. And finally, how we owners can think about handling them in a way that is respectful to what the rabbit needs and still allows the owner to have a better relationship with them. One thing that I would highlight is that often owners really worry about not picking up their rabbits, because they can't imagine what a relationship with a rabbit looks like if they don't pick them up.

And it can take a little bit of adjustment, but there are many, many ways that you can have very good interactions with a rabbit. Those include. Training and hand feeding.

They include giving the choice and stroking the rabbits in areas that they like to be stroked. And what the owners get from that is an animal that really wants to spend time with them, that is excited to see them, is that runs over in the garden or in the house to interact with them. And that enthusiasm, that motivation to seek the owner's company, is something that is, is very special and that a lot, a lot of owners treasure if they can help themselves get past the desire to, to pick up their habits.

Thank you very much for listening. Does anyone have questions? Gwen, that was absolutely fascinating.

I've always known that rabbits didn't like being picked up, but now I finally understand it. So thank you so much. That was brilliant.

Thank you. I, I think the audience, all echo my sentiments because nobody is posing any questions here. So I think you've really got, got everything, lined up and, and hopefully got everybody's minds as straight as, as what I feel like mine is and with this new understanding.

I think it's, it's something that is really obvious. I think when you explain it like this, but what I was really surprised about when I started reading up on it, was that actually there were very few people saying, you know, we shouldn't be picking up rabbits. The people that were saying rabbits don't like being picked up.

They weren't suggesting that the solution was not to pick them up, they were suggesting the solution was to help the rabbits cope with being picked up, which a little bit of a, a sort of backward way round. And that just going through and, and, and assimilating the evidence together. So we, we published a review in JSAP on this, which basically did just say, look, there's lots of evidence on this.

We don't have to. What can we do differently? And I think that was, that was a very important point in kind of opening the discussion, around how we keep rabbits in a way that that better suits their welfare.

Absolutely. And I, I was fascinated. I've never ever seen rabbits sort of coming from next door or coming from outside and going in.

I've seen people getting rabbits in and out of cages like that, but not over that distance. That was fascinating. Yeah, and it's great when the rabbits get out of your garden accidentally, and you're like, how do I get them back?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Catherine asks a great question. She says, how is the best way to examine the genital or bottom area in a clinical exam?

Presumably, there's no way that a vet can examine this without lifting the bunny. Yeah, it's a really, it's a, it's a very fair question. It's one that, Richard Saunders and John Chitti and I have talked about quite a lot, and we, we've published an article on it in for the, for Rabbit Welfare Association fund, which was solely on what vets can do to handle rabbits better in a clinical context.

And basically you're dealing with a a situation where there is no real way that you can desensitise this prey species to being handled in the way you need to handle it to do a proper examination. So the best you can do is handle them, . You know, firmly, safely, and to get the job done as efficiently as possible.

And so that does typically involve, turning them over, because you usually need to get a really good look at what is going on. Especially, you know, when you see the, you know, obese rabbits with that, that kind of, often the obese females have that sort of pocket, skin over the, the, the, the genitals, and that can make it, you need to often avert that, you need to be able to examine them properly to see that. So, Unfortunately, I, there's not really a good way of avoiding that in a veterinary context.

All we can do is is do it as efficiently as possible. That's very interesting. Something that I used and I don't know if it's by accident or whether I'm just it pleases me rather than the rabbit, but I, I cut my hand over their eyes.

Yeah, that's, that's entirely fair. I mean, The, that hope, that the sort of intention of that is to, reduce the, the, the, the, the, the visual input and, hopefully calm the rabbit. It's a totally reasonable thing to do, and they do tend to seem calmer, so I think it's, it's a, a, a good option.

Yeah, the other thing is, is, I, I try never to lose contact with them, so I'm sort of sliding my hands rather than moving them from one place to another. Yeah, absolutely. That's another really good, really good shout.

The other, other things you can do are if you encourage the owner to bring a towel with them, so you have something that always smells like the rabbit, and Actually, when you're doing the consultation on the clinical exam, typically we think about doing a kind of nose to tail exam, but with rabbits, what we try and do is do the least, at least offensive thing first, basically, and work up, because if you start with something that is, mildly unpleasant, so for example, examining the eyes or the ears. The rabbit has got a chance to just slightly accustomed to that. And then the next step up, which might be palpating the abdomen, for example, is a small step and it allows the rabbit to cope a little bit at every stage, whereas going directly to the really, the really, difficult things like turning the.

Over lifting them out to put them on the scales, is, can, can kind of flood them. It's just such a, such a big jump from being in that cage. So we do, suggest that people do the easiest things first and gradually work up, rather than necessarily doing the kind of body systems, nose to tail.

Yeah, yeah. And I mean, that's, these changes are all starting to happen. We know that there's been a lot published recently about cats, and the same thing, you know, don't start at the head, sort of thing with opening the mouth and all that.

So it's, it's just logical, but we don't always think about it because we're not trained like that. Yeah, absolutely. And I think one thing to remember as well is that rabbits, because rabbits interact on the head and they interact with each other grooming the head.

Actually, a lot of the things that we do, other than opening the mouth around the head are actually fairly well tolerated. So even things like touching the eyes and like examining the eyes, we think, oh God, that, that's gonna be quite, I was gonna say in your face, but that's ironic. Quite confronting.

It typically is something that you, you get, you know, all the rabbits groom, rabbits groom each other's eyes all the time. So it's not quite as, unpleasant as we, we think. But then, when we start moving back and, and moving, certainly moving underneath and moving to the pauses, that's when things really start to get stressful.

It's something that I always, I'm asking us to, to, to think about, even when they're stroking their rabbits. Again, typically, somebody who's not used to, to rabbits and is a little bit worried that the rabbit might bite them, they typically go from above and they stroke on the rabbit's back. But actually, rabbits only really, interact on the back if they're.

Showing hierarchical behaviours or sexual behaviours. So, neither of these things are, are exactly what you want. Not stoking it.

So making sure that, you know, the interaction is focused on the head rather than anywhere else, it's very important. Talk about inappropriate moves. Oh, that's fabulous.

Gwen, I feel like we could sit and listen to you for hours. Your, your knowledge and insight and, and what you've brought to understanding tonight has been absolutely fabulous. So thank you so much for your time.

We really do appreciate it. Right, well, it's, it's, it's always lovely to, to, to speak to people who are, you know, as motivated as I am in, in improving rabbit welfare. Thank you.

Excellent, thank you folks, thanks for attending tonight, to dawn my controller in the background. Thanks for making everything happen smoothly and we will see you again on another webinar soon. Good night everybody.