A bonding nightmare (Also, hi all, it’s been a while)

[RetroSquid]

Hi, well. This is the first time I’ve been back here since our end of life decision for Daisy back in December 2021.

After swearing we would never get buns again, it happened. We sort of stumbled into bun parenthood again last year. Meet mother and daughter. Cinnamon (3-4yo) and Hopper (2-3yo)
We, somewhat foolishly, assumed that, as a bonded pair, as mother and daughter, we wouldn’t have any problems with their relationship… Well, we have been proven very wrong.

They came to us in November and things were mostly fine. A little bit of friction, but nothing a few treats and extra attention didn’t solve. But around the very tail end of spring, something changed and they started fighting, seemingly to the death and have been seperated since.

I’ve been working at rebuilding their relationship, rebonding them and generally working my butt off trying to give these two buns their bonded companion back. And absolutely nothing has worked.

They would play nice in the bonding pen for a couple of weeks, at one hour intervals, even being able to set them up in the kitchen while I cook and they would happily sit together, goom eachother and actually look quite happy.

But it’s getting harder and harder, they’re becoming increasingly less tolerant of eachother and it’s now resulting in injuries as, in the blink of an eye, they can go from loafed and calm to fur flying. And we’ve had a couple of vet visits as there has been a couple of quite nasty bites.

Seeing how completely bonded they were… 

It makes it very difficult to deal with how everything is now.

We also, happened upon another bun in need of a home, here’s Biscuits. 

He’s around the same age as Cinnamon. He’s such a friendly, gentle boy.
We had hope that, including a calm, mature boy into the mix might allow Cinnamon and Hopper to exist without eachother being the sole focus of oneanother. And all the individual bonding sessions have been great. He’s been fixed, but is still a little humpy. But neither girl has acted remotely aggressive towards him. They’ve been completely submissive and tolerated his moments of frantic humping, though we’ve been sure to intervene so it doesn’t go on for too long and they’ll then settle down and eat toether or just loaf side-by-side.

But, about an hour ago, we tried the first trio bonding session. A completely neutral space, a big plate of food and two adults on hand to jump in if there is any aggression.

Well… Cinnamon and Hopper were immediately on edge, it was like they didn’t even see Biscuits there. They just wanted to kill. Fur flying in an instant and just stress and chaos. I genuinely don’t see them ever being together again, we’re at a complete loss for what to do…

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