Best age to start training?

[Bambam]

What is the best age to start training your buns? Pebbles and Flin are both under 6 months and they are both unaltered girls. I want to train them to ‘come’ and ‘stand’ and another trick that they can manage. They are both litter trained because Pebbles learnt from bambam and Flin learnt from Pebbles.

Are your buns trained? If so, what can they do?

[HotGinRun]

I started training my bun Bean at twelve weeks. I started off with ‘jump onto the house’, ‘throw the cup’, and ‘stand’. Those are tricks that he can do pretty consistently. The other ones that he can do, but not as well are ‘come’, ‘kiss’, and ‘spin’. I’m currently teaching him how to jump through a hoop. The easiest tricks to teach him modify some sort of existing behavior. The ones that I’m having difficulty with are ‘gimme five’ and ‘kabang!’ because they involve multiple parts or require I catch him in the act of falling over (kabang).

[peppypoo]

I don’t think there’s any particular “best age”…feel free to go ahead and try! They’re never too old to learn either .

[Deleted User]

It doesn’t hurt to try. =] There was a member on here who started training her Wolfie at a very young age. And he was a clever little bugger who picked up on the tricks fairly well.

[Bambam]

Great will start today then haha. What are the best tricks to start with?

[peppypoo]

Teaching them to come when you call is pretty simple and useful too. Begin with calling their name and just handing them a treat (without having them come to you or anything). Repeat this several times over the course of a couple of days and they should expect a treat when they hear their name – from here, make them come to you for the treat after calling their name, starting with just a short distance and backing away farther with time. The important thing is to keep your tone of voice the same when repeating a command…bunnies don’t recognize individual words as much as they do the way you say it.

[HotGinRun]

Clickers help a lot too! It’s a lot easier to mark specific desired behaviors with a click than with a treat sometimes. I would recommend ‘stand’. I think it’s one of the easier ones to pick up because it capitalizes on an existing behavior.

[Elrohwen]

You can train pretty much any animal at any age, so start now! Both of mine can stand up and spin counter-clockwise, and generally come when called. They’ve worked on jumping over a box as well. More practically, I have trained Otto to let me handle a bit more than he would normally tolerate. He can sit on my lap and let me hug him though he’s a very non-touchy rabbit generally. It’s helped him settle down with handling and nail trims (though he still doesn’t enjoy them, just tolerates them).

I would also recommend a clicker. Bunnies aren’t really evolved to work with humans and read our cues the way dogs do, so using a clicker is a great communication device to help them understand exactly when they do what you want.

Another thing to keep in mind is that bunnies generally respond to body language better than verbal cues (which makes sense since they are generally pretty silent in their own communication with each other). Between my two, one pays some attention to verbal cues, but the other has absolutely no idea that words mean anything, so body language works best for them.

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