When Monkey was a baby, she’s try to bite stuff just to see what it was, and if it was edible.. she has since settle d down with it, and has only really bitten me since when I had to give her eye drops.. she was not impressed. Moose nibbles at my hubby’s fingers when they are playing, Moose likes to grab them and toss his fingers away :p

Rabbits cannot see directly in front of their face. It’s a blind spot.

Also baby rabbits like other baby animals I think explore with their mouth.

My bunny nipped a lot in play when he was young. I stopped it by getting up and leaving his pen when he was getting to rambunctious. I’d come back a minute later, but leave if he nipped again. Either this worked, or he just grew out of it 😛

She will probably try to figure out what is acceptable to you and what isn’t. To another bun, giving a good hard nip might be fine, but to you it will probably hurt a bit. If she nips too hard, let out a high pitched yelp. This will tell her that she bit too hard and she’ll probably try to control her bite in the future. They don’t mean to nip hard – they just don’t understand that our hairless skin is tender.

She may have been trying to tell you that she was sick of sitting on your lap and wanted to run around. Bunnies often use nipping to get us to put them down, get out of their way, or generally stop doing something they don’t like 🙂

It’s important at this point that you try to read these signs that she is “done” BEFORE it comes to a bite. If she starts associating nipping with “getting her way” (i.e. being let down) this is a very difficult habit to break. You are basically rewarding her bites. Most bunnies do not like to be held in laps but prefer to sit next to their people so they can come and go as they please.

The same thing can happen with peeing on laps. Bun sits on lap, bun pees, bun gets put down and allowed to play. Therefore… bun gets rewarded.

If you perfect the “bunny-mind-reader” thing, let me know… I could greatly use your services in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio. Lol!

Hahah Beka. So true – much of bunny ownership is learning to outsmart them. I try to tell my bun “no”, but he just thinks I’m being funny and binkies away. Then he returns in about 10 seconds to keep chewing. Lol.

I think of their nips like a 5th hand. They use their mouths to explore, taste, move things (you) and express feelings. I’ve noticed that a bunny is pretty young when it learns to control how hard they set their teeth so they don’t break skin. They almost never do that.

Watch when he’s in your lap if he wiggles his butt around or just becomes restless. That usually is a sign that they need to pee or poo, and would rather be in their litter pan. You can plop him in his litter pan if you see that, and leave the cage door open so if you didn’t read the signals right, he can just come back. But you may have a grateful bunny who’s gotta go.

When Kokanee would groom me, she would do little wee nips-never hard and very much like ‘grooming nibbles’ that other animals do. So it could be that-but if it was isolated little wee nip-exploratory sounds to be what she was doing