Trying to rebound my trio – help us!!

[Lopbabies123]

Hi, I’m new to binky bunny and am looking for some advice.

We have two bonded buns Bailey and Poppy. We bonded them when Bailey Bob was 5 months and Poppy was 2months, they are half brother and sisters. Bailey is now 1year and 4 months. In April I seen Lola in the adoption part of our pet shop and decided I couldn’t leave her after I had a hold of her. Long story short we had the three bonded happily for 2 months. We had a rough time of it to start with as the females would fight over Bailey but it calmed down after a few bonding sessions and they lived together quite the thing in a happy trio.

At the start of September we went in to the bunny room and seen that Lola couldn’t hop very well and seen her head was tilted. We rushed to our vet and she was treated for an ear infection and E.C. Luckily it was only an ear infection as it cleared up in days. She was given ear drops and pain relief and she regained her balance and her her is straight she is back to her usual binky self. However we noticed that there were small poops in the cage and Lola has a history of gi stasis so we had to separate her from Bailey and poppy to monitor poop and fluid intake.

We had a very hectic week and we were due to go on holiday for three weeks. we left them with a boarding lady and even she wasn’t able to bond them again she said that poppy is happy with Lola at all and that poppy was getting annoyed with the lady’s own buns.
We have them home and they were slightly weary of us so we were hand feeding them the vegg but other wise letting them settle in.

I don’t know quite what to do with rebounding them. Lola is getting anxious because she can see her ‘friends’ and I’m guessing she won’t understand that we separated her for her own health. Bailey keeps looking for Lola as well but poppy is different I think we will need to spend a while getting trust back with poppy. She might turn on Lola again if we rebound.

Any advise would be much appreciated.

We tried everything in short bursts while bonding them first. The car ride worked best.
We have just read someone say that you put an inch of water in the bath, just enough so the paws get wet and they will try to jump out. Put a towel in for traction and they will snuggle up on that.. I’m not too sure of that method,. Any thoughts?

Kirsty

[BB & Tiny]

Yes a person named Paradigm seems to be doing an excellent trio bonding. I believe it is under Charlie, George and Albus. I don’t know anything about trio bonding myself I only have two. You may want to glean some ideas from his ongoing thread.

https://binkybunny.com/FORUM/tabid/54/aft/140479/Default.aspx

[Paradigm]

***Dear Admin, I’m not sure whether this link is allowed because I think TanLover14’s blog does sell things BUT the page I’ve linked to is not about that and I think it’s quite valuable.*** 

The blog

Even better (and much more concise) than my advice, is from the blog of TanLover14 who’s bonded many, many rabbits. I’m posting the link to the trio bonding page, but if you look at the ‘Enjoy this? Check out these similar articles’ at the bottom you’ll see the blog posts as she bonds progressively more rabbits to her warren. It’s best to start at the beginning so you can see how she works out the trial and error through her buns and the groundwork the really good suggestions in the later posts is laid in the earlier bonds.

I thought I’d replied to this ages ago!

Personally, I wouldn’t put the bunnies in water because it’s not good for them. If you have trouble with the bonding sessions it might be difficult to dry them off in a timely manner. Wet + Stressed bunnies = not ideal.

Since the car ride worked well, there’s a few different stress bonds I’ve tried:
– Sit the most difficult two (or all three if they’re smaller) on the toilet seat. Ours is plastic, slippery and the bunnies quickly feel as though they’re losing control near the curved edges and tend to huddle together.
– Use the hoover if they are scared of it. This will make them huddle together. Only our aggressor is afraid of it, so I used it in short bursts to classically condition the behaviour out of him. He gradually decreased.
– If I had a box tall enough to keep them in, I would drag them about in it or put them on a washing machine.

Other:
– We started out with stroking their heads together with an oven glove. Hold them together less and less as they get more relaxed with staying together. We allowed the scared bunny to walk around the place while aggressive bunny was being stroked. This helped him become less afraid of Charlie. (That said, we haven’t done this in a while and Albus is becoming more and more afraid of Charlie again.

– If you do banana smeared on heads, do one bunny at a time. You may find the bunny who most wants to be dominant refuses to lick, but with banana on all three heads I found them sparing to be the licker. It was quite amusing but a little ridiculous.

My thread is a bit wordy, but it does go through what I did with them more or less step-by-step.

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