Hi, I’ve been reading here a while, but just joined to get some info on bonding my rabbits.

We got Max from a local animal rescue/shelter in April.  He’s a neutered male lion/lop mix, very sweet and friendly, though he does sometimes get a little territorial in his pen (as in, he’ll nip at your foot sometimes when you first step over the fence; I think it’s partly from excitement about getting attention).  He’s probably around 1-2 years old, I’m guessing on the younger side.  We got Nyla, a spayed female, from the same shelter about five weeks ago; she’s about a year and a half.  Nyla is also sweet and enjoys affection and attention, and she hasn’t display any territorial behaviors so far.

Max and Nyla’s cages are in the same room very close to each other, and their pens (which are attached to their cages) are adjoining; I have an extra x-pen folded in between theirs so they can sniff and see each other, but can’t reach each other.  After a few weeks of this arrangement, I had their first bonding session.  It was in an x-pen area on a carpet; they had a little scuffle partway through, but I calmed them down and kept them in the area until they were both either eating or grooming themselves.

For the second session, I decided to move them to an even more neutral area on hardwood floor; I put a large towel in the area with hay and greens on it.  There was no fighting, and Max mounted Nyla a few times.  She flattened out and allowed him to do so, but when he approached her for grooming she got annoyed and ran away from him.  

The third and fourth sessions were also in the same neutral area, but I removed the x-pen, which gave them a slightly larger area.  

There was more ignoring during the third session, and Max only mounted Nyla once.  While they did stop in front of each other several times and touched noses, Nyla moved away from Max when he would try to interact with her.

This morning, for the fourth session, Max mounted Nyla once (she did her usual flatten out and freeze-up thing), but about ten minutes later, he went to her and groomed her head and ears.  Then he moved around to her rear end and acted like he wanted to mount her again, but she gave a little growl/grunt at him and moved away from him.

What’s confusing me here is that while I’m assuming Max is behaving as the dominant rabbit in the relationship with all the mounting, and Nyla is kind of letting him get away with it until she gets annoyed with it, he also was the first one to initiate grooming – isn’t that normally done by the bunny conceding that the OTHER one is dominant?  Nyla hasn’t tried to mount Max, but she also always greets him by lowering her head in front of him with her ears flat back – not in the threatening “I’m going to get you” way, but like she wants him to groom her; I was under the impression this also implies dominance?  It’s like they both want to be dominant, but Nyla is less pushy about it.

Thanks in advance for any thoughts or advice!