A female bunny absolutely needs to be spayed due to their high risks of reproductive cancers. You need to see a bunny specialized vet in your area that is willing to do the surgery, and has had successful results.

Over 60% (up to 80%, I think) of female bunnies who haven’t been spayed are at risk for cancer once they hit 3-4 years. The sooner you can get it done, the better.

I agree with the others, you need to find a different vet who is experienced in rabbit spays (at least for your bun bun)!

It is quite possible he is a great small animal vet in general, but just not great with rabbits. I have heard some controversy that the 80% cancer stat is exaggerated, but there is good agreement that it is at very least 50%, still very high!

I believe the typical age of spaying for females is 6-8 months, so you have some time to find someone.

Short answer: yes, I agree, you should get her spayed. Is it possible that there is a high volume spay/neuter clinic in your area that sees a decent number of rabbits?

Long answer: I think the internet is a wonderful, wonderful source of information, but also gives everyone the instant chance to be the expert without any actual work. I feel like the stats on unspayed female rabbits and cancer is almost like a game of telephone, with everyone offering numbers and no one offering an actual citation… (no offense meant to anyone here!) So what I’m saying is, it’s not necessary that your vet is either terrible and must be shunned, or an all-knowing expert. If you are confident in him overall based on your interactions with him over the years, why don’t you look up some reliable source on rabbit spays and share it with him? Vets and doctors are people too, and we can all stand to learn. That being said, I definitely wouldn’t let him operate on your rabbit, since it sounds like he is not very familiar with this procedure. If you live in America, the House Rabbit Society may be able to point you towards a clinic in your area that does rabbit spays.

It’s your call about the vet: especially depending on where you live, you might not want to give up on a vet who sees exotic animals that you are overall happy with.

Agreed, OverthinkingBun! Well to add to or maybe to get to the source of the echo chamber, I’ve gone on a little literature hunt I’m not an expert by any means I just enjoyed looking up the original papers and went down a bit of a “rabbit hole”…

Here is the original paper on the topic as far as I can tell: hope the link works…
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2133633/pdf/691.pdf

As far as I can tell, they found 80 incidents in 500 female rabbits over 4 total years. The incidence of tumors did significantly increase with age and was up to 80% in animals over 5 years of age. But other studies that I found cited lower numbers between 30-80%. They also found that the incidence spiked in one year of their study which might have been due to some sort of infectious agent that led to the cancer. Yeesh. Maybe this works similar to HPV and human cervical cancer?

All the original research on the topic was done in breeding colonies, so very different from our rabbits. But it is worth noting that these studies have been repeated in smaller numbers more recently with companion rabbits.

To sum up my thoughts: there is controversy on the exact numbers and percentage of incidents but the risk of cancer is certainly there. Hopefully you can find a rabbit savvy vet who you are comfortable with performing the surgery