OK. Hello. It's lovely to, see you all from the other side of my computer at a different time point.
My name's Gwen Bradbury. I'm a veterinary surgeon. I work with the Rabbit Welfare Association and fund, on the magazine.
And I own and run a teleconsultancy, working with people who encounter behavioural problems in their rabbits. I also have a textbook called behavioural Problems in Rabbits, a clinical Approach, which is available on Amazon. So, today, I want to talk to you about mobilising sedentary rabbits, how to get those rabbits that are not very active, how to get them moving more so we can deliver benefits to health.
And if we think about it, like our medical colleagues, us veterinary professionals know that movement is really important for health. And we might mention it in consultations with dog owners and with cat owners, but we sometimes forget that all animals, including rabbits, have certain requirements for movement. Movement throughout the day is vital for physical and mental health, and a lack of normal movement can affect rabbits in more ways than we expect.
But it can be really hard for owners to know what they need to do and what they need to provide to encourage their rabbits to move. So in today's webinar, I'm gonna talk about why movement is so important and how lack of movement affects health in rabbits. I'm gonna talk about the sort of different movements that rabbit bodies expect.
I'm going to cover why pet rabbit bodies might not get the same sort of movements that they need and what those movements are. And finally, I'm going to talk about what you can advise owners to do to increase their rabbit's movement. Now there are just two points to remember from today's webinar.
One, to increase movement, create an environment that encourages create an environment for the rabbit that enables it to move and ensure the rabbit lives with a bonded companion to encourage it to move. So What do we mean by movement? It's more than just exercise.
Exercise means a type of movement that requires some physical effort that's performed for a short period of time with the intention of improving health and wellbeing, rather than meeting a physical need, for example, going to find food or or or escaping from, from predators. An example of exercise for a rabbit would be an owner letting the rabbit out of its cage for 20 minutes. Movement's also more than activity.
Activity means how an individual moves around in its environment as part of its normal life. So an example of activity for a rabbit would be a rabbit that has to move between several different piles of hay. The rabbit's moving to find food.
Movement actually means exercise, plus activity, plus any movement that doesn't cause the animal to move around. So movements when grooming itself or its companion, when stretching, rearing, grazing, and more. And why must we consider all of the types of movements, because all of the types of movements are important for health.
How much should rabbits move? Well, in the wild, rabbits spend between 11 and 13 hours above ground each day in a home range of between 4000 and 20,000 square metres of grassland. And they spend between 30% and 70% of this time grazing.
This environment clearly drives a range of different ongoing movements. So to allow optimal movement, rabbits would have ongoing access to a large area of outdoor grassland and trees throughout the year. The area would be secure from predators, would have areas that the rabbits could use to hide when fearful, and would allow them to run and graze and dig.
Now practically, most owners cannot provide the the environment that we described. So we need to think very specifically about how to enable a wide variety of movements. Now, we've talked about wild rabbits, but pet rabbits often have really limited opportunities for movement.
Some unfortunate rabbits living in small, unstimulating hutches may spend most of their time in the same position on the same flat surface, moving only to eat food that they barely need to chew. But even rabbits that are very well cared for can be kept by well-meaning owners in a way that doesn't give them the opportunities and stimuli they need to encourage normal movement. And rabbits that don't move normally have poor health.
So, why is movement so important? Why, why do sedentary rabbits get sick? Now, everyone knows the proverb, you need to use it or lose it.
And this certainly applies to how your body moves. For good health, every single joint in your body needs to move every day. Joints that don't move end up being able to move less and less.
Rabbit ears need to move in many directions, for example, the ear pathologies that we see in lop-eared rabbits are partially related to this lack of movement. Rabbits' spines are mood when rabbits hop, when they rear up, when they lie down. And what this does is the, the movement helps to nourish the cartilage discs.
By circulating fluid, and they reduce bony spur formation or osteophytosis on those spinal joints. The limbs obviously need to move and there are so many ways that rabbit limbs move. Think of a rabbit binying, think of a rabbit digging, or a rabbit lying stretched out.
And now think about paws, rabbit paws are very, very complex structures. They've got loads of joints and loads of bones, so they can run sure-footed on lots of different ground surfaces and inclines and textures. Movement also improves gut function.
It facilitates full bladder emptying, and it's vital to ensure the rabbits can continue to eat, seek trace from the anus. Every part of a rabbit's body needs to move. OK, so when do these movements occur?
This graph shows how rabbits kept in pairs on a hay diet spend their time. Now, more importantly, it shows how research is investigating a certain research question, divided up how the rabbit spent its time. Now, if you didn't realise that all movement was important, not just activity, you might think, oh, rabbit's spending 95% of its time not being active.
So clearly it doesn't need to move much. But rabbits are moving most of the time, even if we don't call that activity. So Let's have a look.
Here are some of the examples of movements that occur in different categories of the time budget. Sure, you can guess that an active rabbit is moving around. You can imagine that grooming oneself or its companion requires quite a lot of stretching.
And yeah, we've got a big yellow section here, which is about feeding. But there are lots of movements involved in feeding, not just jaw movements, but neck movements, paw movements, and more. So feeding's a very, very active process for rabbits.
And even within inactivity, that nice big 50% light blue, section, there's still movement because when a rabbit is resting on a surface, its body deforms to the shape of the surface, which stretches ligaments, joints and muscles in unpredictable ways. Now, if that surface is uneven, as you'd find in nature, the body is stretched in a much broader range of ways than if they sleep on a completely flat surface and in the same place every time. But we also have movement of the ears and the eyes.
You've got the fact that actually, if the rabbit is resting on a, on a, on a, a, a moderately uncomfortable surface, then they'll shift, they shift position, they move. They, they don't sit in the same position all the time. And they see atrophs, they interact with companion.
They, they, they're companions. They signal to each other. Even when rabbits are inactive, they are still moving a lot, and these movements are very important.
So This pie chart is based on rabbits kept on a hay diet in pairs. This movement balance can look really different. Imagine how it would look if the rabbit was alone.
If it only ate muesli, muesli foods, if it didn't have enough space. If it only rarely had access to its run, you can imagine that the ways that we keep rabbits can really affect the movements that they can perform. So what space do rabbits need?
Well, we've, we're talking about movement. We're saying it's really important. In order to move, rabbits need to have access to a large enough area to perform these behaviours.
The minimum cage size for UK laboratory rabbits is 1.2 metres by 0.45 metres.
Here's an example, so 22% of pet rabbits live in hutches that are smaller than this. That is 1 in 4 pet rabbits. A recent study looked at the rabbit hutches available, advertised by 8 popular online retailers.
61% of the one-story hutches available didn't even meet these minimum requirements for meat rabbits. And when new rabbit owners, they might assume that because these hutches are legally available to be purchased, then they must be suited to a rabbit's needs. But this is very far from the case.
Rabbits in this size of cage can never move enough. So what does the Rabbit Welfare Association of Fond recommend as the minimum space for a rabbit? It recommends a sleeping area that is, as a minimum, 1.8 metres by 0.6 metres, and that needs to be permanently connected to an enclosure with a footprint of 3 metres by 2 metres.
It suggests that this allows the rabbit some room to move. The rabbit should be able to perform 3 hops, stand on their hind legs, so a 1 metre minimum height. And provides enough space to separate the food, toilet areas and sleeping areas.
And the Rabbit Welfare Association and Fund also points out that this size area is still really limited in terms of what rabbits need. In comparison to the large home range of wild rabbits, this amount of space is actually still not really sufficient to meet their behavioural requirements. Rabbits with a permanent movement area of this size should still be able to have supervised movement in a larger space.
So, how commonly are rabbits actually given this sort of space? Shockingly, 84% of rabbits live in enclosures that are smaller than this, and only 9% of advertised rabbit enclosures from the online retailers met those guidelines, met these guidelines. Which means that the vast majority of rabbits are unable to move enough.
And that's why we see diseases caused by sedentary living. I showed you this diagram earlier when we looked at examples of what parts of bodies need to move. Here are some of the consequences.
Rabbits that don't move enough have a higher risk of osteoarthritis. Paws that spend their time on flat, hard, artificial surfaces get podo dermatitis. The force is through the same part of the heel, wearing away the fur and then wearing away the skin.
Rabbits which don't move enough are more at risk of urinary tract disease. Weak pelvic muscles alter the rabbit's ability to get in the right position to fully empty its bladder. And muscles that don't move enough also mean that the rabbit has got reduced kidney filtration throughout the day, increasing the risk of precipitation of sludge in the bladder.
Rabbits that don't move end up with weak, sluggish movements, peristaltic movements in the gut, because they're not, the gut isn't strengthened by the muscular contractions that occur under the different loads you get during normal movement. Sedentary rabbits are at higher risk of fractures of the limbs and spinal cord because the bones aren't strengthened by the impacts and loads of normal movement. So when the rabbit is exposed to an unexpected load, which often isn't isn't even that big, so jumping off a relatively small, a relatively small height, the bones can just break.
And finally, normal head and jaw movements during grazing help to move the earwax up the escalator of hairs in the ear canal, reducing the risk of occlusion or infection. So these are a whole load of diseases that make rabbits physically unhealthy, but sedentary rabbits are also mentally unhealthy. The brain needs movement from a physical perspective like all organs, but also movement is stimulating and rewarding.
Sedentary rabbits have poor mental health too. So, that's the bad stuff, right? There are loads of different movements that rabbits need.
Some are very obvious and some are not. So in the next few slides, I'm going to show you the results of a few studies that looked at how behaviours differed between rabbits with different diets or with different levels of companionship. So, how does diet facilitate movement?
This paper was published as part of the study looking at differences between rabbits eating hay only diet, eating nuggets and hay, muesli and hay, or just muesli. Let's look at how these diets affected the sort of movements that the rabbits performed. Let's look first at the active or investigative bar on the far right of your screen.
This is probably what you think of when you think about rabbits moving, hopping, chasing, jumping, digging, chin marking, stretching. Are you surprised that it's so little? Just 4% of their time?
When people want to give their rabbits exercise, they expect to be increasing the proportion of time spent that rabbit spends doing active exercises, active behaviours. But actually, you're probably not really going to increase this, but be able to increase this very much. It's much better to focus your efforts to increase movements in the other parts of the rabbit's life, because the rabbit spend so much more time doing this.
So then we have maintenance behaviours. Next one across. These are when the rabbits are grooming themselves or their companions.
Also very important movements, and they're a very predictable pattern in which, in which the joints are moved. You can see that when rabbits don't have as much time spent doing other very normal behaviours, they might spend more time grooming themselves, and that is certainly something we see. So let's look at feeding now on the left of your screen.
We can see that rabbits eating a hay-only diet, spend a lot of their day eating, drinking, and eating see trophs comparable to the amount of time that a wild rabbit spends on these. And we can see that rabbits just eating muey spent a quarter of that time eating. Eating is a movement, jaw movement, as I said, but head and neck movements, and full spinal movements for reaching seeker trophs.
And if you've watched rabbits eating hay, they also move their front paws as they try to move the hay out of the way to select the choices bits. And now let's look at the inactive bar. Even rabbits on hay-only diets spend half of their time doing this.
But as I said on a previous slide, being inactive doesn't mean that there is no movement happening. Rabbits lie in different positions, sometimes tucked down, tucked up, sometimes stretched out, sometimes with head or ears, or up or down. We've talked about the difference from natural surfaces versus very flat artificial surfaces.
But we can also understand that the, the loads that are generated, when resting are important for health. But that doesn't mean that spending 50% of your time doing more, so the difference between rabbits on a hay-only diet versus rabbit on a muesli only diet, it doesn't mean that if we just make them, make them lie down more, this is good. We need the diversity.
We need the variety of movement to drive health. So how does company facilitate movement? This is a different research group so that the cat the categories are a little bit different, don't worry about that.
But the fundamental question was how does behaviour change if a rabbit lives with a companion or if they live on their own? Rabbits kept with other rabbits, spent a lot longer performing comfort behaviours, such as grooming themselves or grooming their companion, and marking or investigatory behaviours. And they spent less time doing maintenance behaviours, such as standing, resting, feeding, and eliminating.
Obviously, if you live on your own, you can't perform an agonistic behaviour. So this is a behaviour, that has some component of, aggression or hierarchy or, or threat signalling to another rabbit. If you're on your own, you can't perform that clearly.
Stereotypic behaviours not not observed in any of the rabbits, in, in groups, but, actually 6% of the time in singly house rabbits. So what this shows us is that you, you get a wider variety of movements when you keep rabbits with other rabbits. It's another, another of the reasons that keeping rabbits together is so important for their health and welfare.
OK, so which movements do rabbits need? Bodies need, as I've mentioned before, variety to thrive, they need variety of stimulation, variety of diet, and variety of movement. So let's go through some examples of the different movements that rabbits need.
Running, obviously important for muscle strength, which is important for normal venous return. Jumping on and off things is important for bone density, reducing fracture risk. Digging strengthens the forelimbs, rearing up strengthens the spine.
Wet weight bearing on uneven natural surfaces, moves the complex, joints in the feet, and it distributes load, reducing the risk of sore hocks. Grooming important for spine flexibility. Grazing is important for dental and jaw health.
Shifting position is important for blood flow and pressure distribution in the internal organs. And as I alluded to earlier, when you learned about cartilage, you probably remember that cartilage doesn't have blood vessels in it. It gets nutrients because the synovial fluid is pumped through the cartilage when the joint is moved.
This means that repetitive loading and unloading of joints of the cartilage in joints reduces the risk of and progression of osteoarthritis. Lying in different positions helps muscles and fascia to stretch, keeping the tissues at the right length for optimal movement. Movement also helps the mucociliary escalator in the lungs and the, the trachea to function properly, helping to move particles out of the lungs.
It optimises the function of the visceral organs, so it causes compression and relaxation that prevents fluid acc accumulation in the lowest parts, pooling. Movement alone is not sufficient for weight loss, modifying the diet is necessary, but it reduces the risk of subsequent disease. When tissues don't move, they become weaker, when tissues are weaker, they're more likely to become diseased, and they're more likely to affect other adjacent tissues.
And finally, because movement is so important, nature has incentivized animals to move by making it feel good. Movement is rewarding and interesting. And again, I sound like a broken record, but movement is vital for health.
So what stops a rabbit from moving? Fundamentally, there are 2 reasons. Either they can't move or they don't want to move.
Many rabbit environments significantly restrict the range of movements that a rabbit can display. The environment might be too small. This is an image of a rabbit in a too small hutch.
It doesn't have permanent access to a run, so it cannot choose to move in the way it wants. Rabbits need to have an area on the same level. I showed you those rabbits, the, the recommendations earlier.
But they need to have an area on the same level that's large enough for the rabbit to at least perform 3 hops. Having the same area over different levels doesn't replace the larger area because the rabbit's movements are much more restricted. We can all see that the hutch on the left is clearly too small, even though there's access to grass, which is good, but the, the overall space is tiny.
The shed on the right has got lots of floor area, but it's on different levels. So this should only be used in conjunction with permanent access to a large floor space. So lack of motivation, there are various reasons why rabbits might not be motivated to move around.
The environment might lack simulation, simulation could be through sight, sound, smell, or texture. The environment might also be set up in a way that reduces the rabbit's motivation to move around. For example, with food offered in bowls right next to the rabbit's litter trays and preferred resting space.
And the rabbit might not live with a bonded companion, which, as we saw, reduces their ability to show many normal behaviours that require movement. Indoor rabbits are at particular risk of inactivity. I've talked about this before, I've had a whole other webinar with a webinar vet that's still available on indoor rabbits specifically.
But the reason that indoor rabbits are at particular risk of inactivity is because the outdoor environment has so much more variation on a minute to minute basis. You get changes in wind strength, light levels, cloud shadows, weather conditions, external noises, different smells, sight of birds, and more. And all of these variations stimulate the rabbit to investigate what has changed and to react to those changes.
Additionally, many outdoor environments have growing plants that rabbits can graze on. This, fresh, fresh plants, fresh grass, has a higher water content than hay. So rabbits need to spend more time eating to consume the same number of calories.
We said that rabbits on a hay-only diet spend about 50% of the time feeding. And that wild rabbits varies between 30% and 70%, and the higher end of that is likely because of the fact that the food they're eating has a higher water content. So they need to spend that extra time eating.
Grazing, unlike being fed in a pile, with a pile of hay, grazing also stimulates the rabbits to move every few bites, so they cover a larger area of ground. Indoor rabbits are exposed to many fewer stimuli a day. And then in addition, they may also have their ability to move limited by types of flooring.
So slippery indoor floors like this one for example, reduce the rabbit's willingness to move around and the speed at which they can travel. So, how do you get rabbits to move more? It's very clear that unwittingly owners might set up their rabbits' lives in a way that encourages them not to move enough and that this can damage their health.
What can we do? First, we can think about enabling movement, providing continuous access to an adequately sized enclosure. So what's that adequate size of an enclosure?
As I said earlier, Rabbit Welfare Association and Fund recommends to reme for easy ease of remembering, about 3 metres by 2 metres and 1 metre height. And within that, there is a a minimum hutch size of 1.8 metres by 60 centimetres deep and 60 centimetres high, connected to this bigger enclosure.
3 metres long, 2 metres wide, 1 metre tall. This should allow the rabbits some room to move, to do those three hops, stand on their hind legs, and provides enough space to separate out the food, toilet areas, sleeping areas, water. And remember that rabbits in with a permanent movement area of this size should still be able to have supervised movement in a larger space.
There are various ways to increase the area allocated to the rabbit, so garden sheds can be converted to many level rabbit enclosures with cat flaps out into runs. There's a great rabbit welfare Association and fund webpage on this, look up converting a garden shed. There are also certain companies that make mesh connectors to connect different enclosures, and they can even be used to connect to a cat flap or a wall conduit, so the rabbits can choose to go indoors and outdoors.
Again, this is another level of benefit because the rabbit can choose how to react to different stimuli in its environment. Another thing we can do to enable movement is to provide substrates to dig. Digging is a vital movement for rabbits to perform.
It stimulates their, it strengthens and stimulates their forelimbs, their neck, and their back, and it's very rewarding. Rabbits love doing this. But in order for rabbits to dig, they need to have the right sort of substances that trigger the behaviour.
Some rabbits, if they don't have any access, such as those that live indoors on hard flooring or outside in a run with a mesh floor, may actually not be able to show this behaviour at all. And they will often try to, to express it in a certain way. So owners can feel very frustrated that their rabbit tries to dig holes in their carpet.
But this happens because the drive to dig is so strong that rabbits will work really hard to perform some form of digging behaviour. So what are good substrates? Rabbits like to dig substances that retain some shape and that don't collapse immediately.
So slightly damp soil is much better than sand or dust. They also use both their teeth and their paws while digging. So if you actually watch a rabbit digging in, in, soil where there is, where there are roots where the soil's a little bit hard, often you'll see that their mouth is actually really quite full of mud, and after.
They'll spit it out and they'll clean their mouth and they'll clean their face, because the teeth and the pores are both really important. And you can imagine what those loads on the jaw, what those loads on the mouth, how much they're strengthening the rabbit's skull. This image shows a digging corner in a rabbit enclosure at a zoo, where the zoo has tried to provide some, some sort of area for the rabbit to dig, given that the rest of the area is very hard, very artificial floor.
Now, they could make it much more interesting by hiding bits of food in the soil, putting branches on top of the soil, but it's a good example of actually providing an area for a rabbit to dig. Hay is actually a pretty good substrate for digging, provided that there's enough of it and that it's in a place that the rabbit can dig. So in a litter tray rather than a hay rack, for example.
Rabbits are also very motivated to nibble and bite and rearrange hay, so it makes a good substrate for digging behaviour and stimulates a lot of movement. Remember that having long chop hay, so having hay with long strands, stimulates these behaviours much more than short chop hay. And so rabbits typically engage with and eat more hay that has got a reasonable strand length.
Really important to look for the owners look for this when they're trying to provide hay. And if owners say that the rabbits don't like hay, ask about what, what they've offered because having very short chop hay is often a a pitfall that that owners fall into. So that's about enabling movement, providing stuff space and providing the right substrates.
Now let's talk about how we encourage movement. The most important way of encouraging a rabbit to move is to make sure that they live with a bonded companion. Rabbit interactions with other rabbits include neutral grooming, gro like soliciting grooming, which is when they lower their head or they nudge, or they come over each other, to each other to see whether the other one might groom them.
There's also chase behaviours, and there are play behaviours. And there's also modelling and copying of demonstrated behaviours. So rabbits can learn from each other.
So having two rabbits together increases the interest in the environment, but it also helps the rabbits to copy each other and to behave in the same way. This is very rewarding, and it certainly leads to a wide variety of different behaviours. What this means is that providing a companion will provide more benefits to the rabbit that's in enriching its environment.
Getting a second rabbit is a much better welfare investment than improving the environment. So when owners are trying to work out what to do, the companionship requirement is so strong that for any owner who's keeping a rabbit on their own, you should be highlighting the enormous welfare benefits on lots of different vectors that come from providing a companion. So, we've seen that hay stimulates rabbits to spend more time feeding, but it stimulates digging behaviours, and we know that it's vital to a rabbit's physical health.
We also mentioned that rabbits eating hay perform most of the same behaviours as they do when they grazing grass, but the big difference is that grazing requires the rabbits to move around much more. It takes many small movements in addition to many big movements. Now owners can replicate a bit of that movement by feeding hay in many different locations within the within the enclosure.
So the rabbit just has to move around to check what is provided in different places. We also, to increase the stimulation of a rabbit's environment, owners should think about providing spaces for them to perform different types of movement. So an area to dig in.
So as we said, crumbly soil is great, but scrunch paper, plastic ball, even plastic balls can, can be a little bit interesting to provide some form of digging. They also want things to jump up onto and to hide underneath. Cardboard boxes are a great, a great way to start, but there are, there's many, there are many great examples of repurposed child's toys, small chairs, etc.
That provide this kind of multi-level difference to the environment. There's also providing food and hay in different locations and hidden within the environment to stimulate foraging behaviours. Providing fresh branches is great if you, if you can find them.
Again, the Rabbit Welfare Association fund has an excellent list of edible branches. And the great thing about these is that they allow the rabbits to show lots of different sorts of eating movements, and they have to adopt lots of different positions in order to strip the bark effectively off a branch, which is obviously a pretty complex shape. And finally, owners can play games with their rabbits, teaching them to come back to a whistle, and they can train them to do other behaviours requiring movement for a feed reward.
Now, if possible, rabbits should be able to spend some time outside, even if just intermittently. The exposure to unfiltered ultraviolet light boosts vitamin D levels in rabbits, and the variety of stimuli will drive much more movement. If they can graze outside, even better, they'll cover a much larger areas and will be, will be motivated to keep moving on.
When rabbits are trained to recall to a whistle, it makes it much easier to give them some supervised time outside because you have a good way of bringing them back. Now, this is a, a picture of one of my own rabbits. It looks like her head is at a very unusual angle.
That is because it is. She's looking for food in a box that has had holes cut in it and it's got paper in. So if owners choose to feed rabbits on concentrated foods such as nuggets or pellets, or coated hay products, then they should feed the products in a way that stimulates some of the rabbits' normal feeding behaviours.
Small pieces of food can be scattered in hay or across the floor, so the rabbit has to use sight and smell to locate the food. Food can be hidden in cardboard boxes to make them more interesting to the rabbits. Certain puzzle feeding balls designed for dogs can be used to dispense rabbit food.
And these, these can be quite, quite useful, and rabbits often learn pretty quickly because rabbits rely on scent to locate food underneath their noses. So they are very motivated to learn how these toys work. But always remember, rabbits should only be fed a very small amount of concentrated food every day.
And they often rapidly learn how to empty puzzle feeding devices very effectively. So, puzzle feeding devices rarely stimulate prolonged movement in rabbits. They don't significantly increase rabbit's movement in a day, but they're fun for rabbits and owners, and they can be useful to reduce food-related aggression and just provide a bit more stimulation in the environment.
Now, because of the culture we live in, we often believe that movement means exercise, that we can do short periods of a certain type of movement and offset the negative effects of being sedentary for the rest of the day. But unfortunately we now know that that's not how bodies work. That a small dose of daily exercise is better than nothing, but it falls far short of the types and levels of movement that bodies need.
Rabbit bodies are exactly the same. If you look up how to get your rabbit to move more, there's lots of advice about training rabbits to do tricks and helping them to exercise, but this kind of misses the point. If owners are relying on themselves rather than on the environment to help and to make the rabbits move, then the times for movement that are available to the rabbits will always be intermittent.
They'll always be too short, and they are very easy for the owners to deprioritize. Rabbits also get bored. It's not possible to create a movement routine that depends on a human that provides sufficient movement to a rabbit.
Sure, there are benefits to training. I've talked extensively about this in other webinars, improving the relationship between an owner and a rabbit, reducing the need for handling rabbits, but training does not materially increase a rabbit's movement. The best way to encourage a rabbit to move are to set up its environment to stimulate normal types of movement in normal quantities.
So, in conclusion, inactivity can cause a range of health problems in rabbits. When you see a rabbit in a veterinary consultation, try to ask about its environment and it's companionship. If the rabbit's healthy, talk about how movement is important to reduce the risk of disease.
It's, and then if the rabbit has a disease associated with a lack of movement, talk about movement to reduce clinical signs or slow the progression of that disease. Always recommend that rabbits are kept with bonded rabbit companions and provide advice on space and stimulation to help owners to make their environment more stimulating. You will then be improving the welfare of every rabbit you see.
Thank you for listening and I hope that gives you a newfound appreciation of what veterinary professionals and owners can do to reduce sedentary behaviour in rabbits.
