Posted By Fluffykins on 12/11/2017 2:18 PM

Aggression, territorial behaviour etc in rabbits is actually typical *female* behaviour. The males are stereotypically the placid chilled out ones.

Of course just like humans don’t neatly fit into all the stereotypes, nor do animals. It’s just good to know it can be more likely.

Same with the m/f pair. They are just more likely to get on. Doesn’t mean there arent hundreds of m/m and f/f bunnies getting along perfectly fine.

Now I’m curious about my supposedly-female bun. Boopie is nearly double Lily’s size, but Lil is definitely the alpha bun; she’s pretty chill, and now I’m wondering if that’s because she is a he.

At this point, I’ll never remember to call them by new pronouns and I definitely don’t want to rename them. So unless it’s medically relevant, we’ll keep everything the way it was.

I had no idea~ this is my first time owning bunnies, and the person I adopted from told me that 2 males or 2 females will fight to the death.

Boopie and Lil have been together from birth, though we separated them once some of the aggressive behaviours started. They’re in the same room, with one in the playpen and the other in a large-dog crate I borrowed from a friend (until we can get a second playpen). The cages are approximately 6 inches apart, so they can see and smell each other, as I heard that this will help them to bond later on.

Once Boopie recovers from surgery, it’ll be Lil’s turn. Hopefully all goes smoothly.

Posted By LBJ10 on 12/11/2017 6:29 PM

My boys love each other.

If you have two girls, it isn’t the end of the world. Gender isn’t what really matters. It really all comes down to personality in the end. Did you look down there at all? How old is Lily now? The older they are, the easier it is to determine male/female. If the original owners looked when they were both babies, misidentified one or both of them (which is common with young bunnies), and never looked again… then I could see how they would think one was male and one was female when it wasn’t true.

Lily and Boopie are both approximately 17 weeks old (I don’t know their exact date of birth, but they were 9 weeks old when we adopted them at the middle-end of October).

Gender doesn’t really matter; I just want my buns to be as safe and happy as they can, so we had the vet do the procedure anyway (since it sounds like Boopie had already been shaved and put under when the vet realized she was a girl bun). Since Boopie has a neutral name, we’re not going to change it- as for Lily, we’ll shorten it to Lil if we find out she’s a he, since it’s his/her nickname anyway.

The only thing that concerns me is if both were misidentified and Lily is actually a he, the mounting that we thought was a display of dominance might mean that we’ll end up with a surprise litter… Definitely not ideal, though I suppose we can live with it, if it comes to that.

Thank you, everyone, for your kind words and advice.