I decided to make a thread for this bonding process, because it’s my first time bonding and I think I’m going to have lots of questions along the way. I was hoping these two would make it easy, but it doesn’t look like they’re going to. Trixie is our first rabbit; she’s a 1-year-old spayed female who is very independent and kind of skittish.  Oscar is a 5-year-old neutered male who is more easy-going. We adopted him from a family who no longer had enough time to take care of him. An additional factor with him is that he has sore hocks that aren’t open, cracked or bleeding, but I am treating those separately and have to consider them. The family we got Oscar from has said that if I don’t think these two will work out I can call and they will take him back; but he’s a really sweet guy and I am really hoping I can find a way to make this work.

Oscar came to our house this weekend, and he has his own cage close to Trixie’s NIC cage. I’ve been keeping her on the lower level of her cage so she has to stay in eye contact of him. She is very interested in his cage and wants to sniff around it and has pawed at his bars as though she wants to get in, but if he comes near her cage she scuffles at her bars and floors, and she chews at the bars as though she wants to bite him. I put one of her stuffed animals in his cage when he arrived and rubbed a new stuffed animal all over him (including under his chin) and put it with her. Neither of them have had any aggression towards the animals; I’m going to switch the animals out today to “refresh” the scents. I had planned to switch litter boxes and then cages but have not done this yet due to the sore hocks.

For the meetings, we did two meetings on Saturday when he came home and 3 meetings Sunday and yesterday. The first meeting was in our bathroom. It went ok; there wasn’t really any fighting, nipping, biting, etc. He wanted to mount her a lot, and she wasn’t interested but she wasn’t aggressive with him when he tried it. She did run away and there was some chasing.  She also mounted him once. At this point though, he is pretty comfortable being around her; he will groom himself, explore, and sniff her. She, however, doesn’t trust him at all and is completely through with his attempts to mount her. She spends most of her time crouched in the corner and each time he comes near her she whips her head and/or entire body around so he can’t come up behind her. When he does attempt to mount her at this point she gets aggressive. In our last two meetings yesterday they each had some fur pulled out; no blood has been drawn yet. When he mounts her he does try to get ahold of her neck with his teeth. Last night he was also trying to stick his head underneath her stomach and nip her, which was a brand new behavior for him. I think part of my problem is that I am not sure how far I should let their skirmishes go before I squirt them or separate them manually so they can work out their dominance. I don’t want either of them to get seriously hurt, so I don’t know if I’m intervening too quickly.

All the meetings have been in neutral places, including one yesterday in the bathtub. I’ve tried to end on a positive note, but by yesterday when I tried to get them together to lay next to each other to pet them they were running to get away from each other. I also tried smearing banana on their heads last night to get them to groom each other; he groomed her just fine but she wouldn’t touch him. I’ve tried giving them treats together; he eats his right away but she freezes up and won’t touch hers until he’s in the opposite corner.

I know this is really long, but I feel like it’s getting worse instead of better, and I feel like I’ve read everything on the Internet and don’t know what to do. Help?