Hello all! I have found Binky Bunny an excellent resource and am hoping for some bonding advice.

We inherited a young boy bunny from family members who couldn’t care for him a few months ago. We estimate he is just under a year old at this point, a 4.5# charcoal lop eared ball of energetic bun fun. We named him Muzumi, then promptly nicknamed him kamikaze because he is fearless and always getting into trouble. We got him fixed soon after we got him, ~3 months ago. He’s semi-bonded to our aging cat and l’ve been worried about him being lonely when Ashes passes away, so I decided to adopt a bun girlfriend.

I scoped out the local shelter last weekend and decided on a good candidate, a mellower 2.5 year old, 5# tan lionhead. We went to the shelter and let them meet, everything seemed to be going well per the shelter staff, and we brought Kitsune home. It continued to go very well the first couple of days, they were vaguely interested in each other and we could leave them in neutral territory with no incident. Muzumi even groomed Kitsune a few times, after presenting to her and being ignored. We let them be out in the living room together with no problems.

Kitsune was not yet comfortable here, had teeny tiny poops and was nervous. Well, as soon as she got comfortable mid-week, she decided to start fighting Muzu during the bonding sessions. I’m not quite sure what went wrong – Muzu was in love, he’s not at all territorial, had no issue with her hopping in his pen when they were out for playtime. At first I thought they just needed to sort out the dominance issues – Muzu thought he’d be the boss and it turned out he wasn’t – but they had a couple of pretty bad hair pulling fights. No bun injuries, though I got bit pretty darn hard on the calf. So we went back to closely supervised sessions, which went poorly, and have resorted to short bathtub sessions this weekend. Muzu is pretty relaxed as long as Kitsu isn’t trying to attack him. She, on the other hand, can’t relax and we’ve had to do the bunny smoosh A LOT – the water bottle isn’t working, scaring her doesn’t seem to be working and I feel bad for terrorizing her.

They are housed side by side in x-pens and we’re swapping pens daily.

Any ideas as to her behavior change? Am I just expecting too much, too soon?