Bonding female free roam bunny

[mcrice14]

Hi everybunny,
I got my first bunny as an adult (had a single when I was a kid) a few months ago and it seems like the consensus is that it’s ideal for them to have friends when it’s possible, so I’ve started looking into getting a friend for her. I’m getting an unneutered male for her soon and I’ll be having him neutered ASAP. (She is also spayed.)

My question for you all is where I should keep my bunnies during pre-bonding and bonding. I live in a small two storey house with two bedrooms upstairs and one big room downstairs. My lady bunny has been free roam downstairs and hates her pen (gnaws on the bars and gets territorial). I’ve heard that people recommend putting the buns in their cages in a shared space and letting them exercise in the big area one at a time works but I feel really bad for lady bun when she has to stay in her pen. It’s also not really possible to split the downstairs in two because of how the furniture is laid out. Would it work to keep lady bun downstairs and gentleman bun upstairs in one of the bedrooms during pre-bonding and just moving their stuff around? Should I put lady bun upstairs and gentleman bun downstairs since female rabbits are more likely to be territorial and we need to make her be less territorial about the region that will eventually be the area they will share? Should we split the spare bedroom in half and have them share that area (140 sq feet) during the day with an hour or two each downstairs so that they spend time together and lady bunny forgets she used to be the only bunny downstairs? Or will letting them exercise downstairs just make them both be territorial about the downstairs?

Also, the lady bun was a little nippy (I think just to get attention?) when I first got her but she’s calmed down a lot and only nips a little now and only then very lightly. Will that make it harder for her to bond with a new rabbit? I assume not since it never seemed like she was that angry, but wanted to check what you all thought.

Thanks so much!

[Sirius&Luna]

Swapping them between areas is important because it means your female bun will lose a sense of what is her territory. If it’s for a short time (a couple of months) then I don’t think its cruel to keep her in a pen (and obviously let her out for extra exercise time) to ensure successful bonding. But the split bedroom idea will also work (ensuring that there’s double bars so they can’t nip through them). You can then thoroughly clean the downstairs and maybe even rearrange some furniture, so when you move them back downstairs, it seems like a new neutral area.

Remember to also keep one room (the bathroom perhaps) totally neutral to bond them in.

When you bring the new male bun home, it’s best to give him a couple of weeks to settle in without seeing the other rabbit, so maybe it would be good to have him upstairs during that time. After that, you can start prebonding.

Nipping is how bunnies communicate, so I wouldn’t worry about it making her unbondable.

Before you start bonding I would advise reading some bonding threads so that you get an idea of what the process looks like in reality, and also the bonding section in BUNNY INFO if you haven’t already

[mcrice14]

Thanks for your advice, Sirius&Luna!

Our new boy bunny is home and ready to start prebonding, I think. He’s been neutered for two weeks and doesn’t seem hormonal at all (even though he was very much so when we first got him). I’m planning to prebond for a few more weeks before letting the two rabbits be in the same space with no barrier but I brought him into a blocked off section of the downstairs earlier today. (We ended up just accepting it’s going to be awkward to walk around the downstairs for a while).

I’ll be going out of town for a while in a few weeks and I’m wondering whether it’s a good idea to have them in a prebonding arrangement while I’m gone of if I should fully separate them. On one hand, if they’re getting along in bonding sessions by then, it might be nice for them to at least be able to sit next to each other while I’m gone. On the other, I don’t want them to bite through the cage bars when I’m not there to intervene. Thoughts? Hypothetically, how necessary is the no-man’s-land between their enclosures if they haven’t been fighting during bonding sessions?

[Sirius&Luna]

Some space between enclosures is always important. Honestly, you never know what might set unbonded bunnies off. I learned the hard way when my boy got bitten through bars. The other thing to consider is how easy it is to secure – you don’t want your bunny sitter to accidentally let them get to each other – I find it’s quite difficult to get non-rabbit people to understand just how serious it would be if they got in a fight!

[mcrice14]

Ok, on your advice I got another fence to ensure there’s a space between their pens, and there’s plenty of room between them now. That’s also a good point about impressing upon the pet sitters how important it is to keep them separate. It’ll be good to be able to ask them to make sure they close one pen before opening the other.

Now, before I got the second fence, I had them just separated by one fence and saw that sometimes they touched noses. Some fraction of the time, there was the appearance of what I’m guessing was a light nip on the nose. I could see their noses/mouths close together and then the girl would hop back a bit. She didn’t seem terribly bothered in the long term since she kept coming over to the fence when he was near it sometimes so I didn’t think it was a huge deal but now I’m starting to question that because she’s still chewing on the bars of her pen a lot and the boy bun has started doing it sometimes, too. On one hand, she was a huge bar chewer to begin with but on the other, it seems like bar chewing is a signal she’s distressed by the other bun or switching spaces every day? If it’s just that she wishes she had more space, that’s something that will eventually get better but I’m worried it means she still hates the other bun from when he nipped her nose.

Also, now I’m concerned that the boy bun is an aggressive rabbit. He previously lived with people that had him with their cats sometimes and I’m worried that he’s learned to be aggressive to protect himself and will terrify the girl bunny. Is that a thing anyone’s ever heard of? He might also just be kind of aggressive for no reason. It took weeks and the neuter to get him to lay off his hormonal behaviors with me. He’s a compete softy to me and my bf now, but I worry the girl bunny won’t have the patience we did. Would changing his diet affect his behavior? He was overweight when we got him and we’ve been careful to feed him just the amount of pellets recommended for his weight (with greens and oodles of hay) but he’s lost weight pretty quickly and I hope he isn’t hangry all the time.

Additionally, what are your opinions of putting some hay down on the edge of their pens near each other so they can munch nearby? Good? Problematic?

Sorry this is a million thoughts. It’s awesome being able to get advice and post in this forum so they’re not just bouncing around my head (and my bf doesn’t have to discuss the rabbits endlessly, lol).

[Sirius&Luna]

Bunnies do get annoyed by the switching, when they see the other bun in their space, so its perfectly normal for them to both seem annoyed. They’ll calm down over time and it’s good that they get any aggression out the way before they every meet. A nip is a bunny way of communicating, so as long as there wasn’t any blood drawn, she probably won’t hold a grudge over it.

There’s no reason to assume that the boy will be aggressive. To be honest, it’s more likely that your girl will be, as females are more territorial and aggressive generally. Either way, you will be so close to them during the bonding that no one should get injured.

All rabbits always act starving. As long as he has a constant supply of hay, he won’t go hungry

Eating nearby each other is a good thing to do

[mcrice14]

Hi,
We started bonding sessions and have been doing one to two hour sessions with them in a 16 sq ft area without any full-on fights but I’m getting concerned that the male rabbit just doesn’t want to be friends with the female rabbit. She will go up to him and put her head down like she wants him to groom her and he’ll just ignore her. Sometimes he just hops away after a minute or two of her just standing there completely motionless with her head down and sometimes he nips after a while and she hops away. Is this common for some rabbits to just not want to interact with other rabbits? It would make sense if it seemed like he was also trying to be dominant, but he doesn’t seem like he cares at all.

[mcrice14]

Hi,
We started bonding sessions and have been doing one to two hour sessions with them in a 16 sq ft area without any full-on fights but I’m getting concerned that the male rabbit just doesn’t want to be friends with the female rabbit. She will go up to him and put her head down like she wants him to groom her and he’ll just ignore her. Sometimes he just hops away after a minute or two of her just standing there completely motionless with her head down and sometimes he nips after a while and she hops away. Is this common for some rabbits to just not want to interact with other rabbits? It would make sense if it seemed like he was also trying to be dominant, but he doesn’t seem like he cares at all.

[Sirius&Luna]

It’s fine and perfectly normal for them to ignore each other at the beginning. How long have you been doing the bonding sessions for? (as in how many days, not how long is each session)

It sounds like he isn’t ready to groom her yet, which is fine. They need to build trust!

If he didn’t want a friend, he would probably be full on fighting – honestly ignoring is a good start!

[mcrice14]

Yay! That’s good to hear. We were getting kind of worried. They snuck into each other’s spaces like a month ago and didn’t seem to have fought at all (no fur or anything out of place when we found them and they were sitting near each other, with one flopped and the other seeming fairly comfortable, too.) Since they didn’t appear to have fought, we did like 10 or so sessions over a week, about 3 weeks ago, but then we were out of town until a few days ago, and we’ve done like 4 in the last few days. One other thing that may be a bit of a wrinkle is that we broke up any potential fights pretty early in the first couple of sessions, so I’m concerned all we did was condition the male rabbit not to nip at the girl rabbit, rather than allow them to sort of who would be dominant. Now that I write it out, it seems like it hasn’t been too long, and it’s probably not surprising they aren’t best friends yet. Thanks for your input!

[Sirius&Luna]

I think really we should only be counting the recent 4, as the 10 a few weeks ago are probably too long ago (but still a good indicator that they tolerate each other!).

On average, it seems like it takes most people around a month to bond their buns, but of course some take much longer. So it’s really very early days. It can feel like its at a standstill sometimes, which is when it’s good to change things around (bigger or smaller area, stressing etc). But at the moment, I would just be working on increasing the time they spend together, and hopefully they’ll start to interact more naturally

Just FYI:

Positive behaviours: Grooming themselves or each other, flopping together or near each other, relaxing, eating together, mirroring behaviour
Neutral: ignoring each other, humping, nipping
Negative: face humping, biting, chasing, bunny tornado

[mcrice14]

Hi,
So we did a week or so of longer and longer sessions with the bunnies together and eventually all the nipping stopped and the male bunny let the female bunny groom him all the time and they flopped near or on top of each other so we considered them bonded and had them together full time after doing a full 24 hours with no negative behavior. We thought they were bonded and the male was just kind of uninterested in grooming.

Now, after a few weeks, we’re seeing some negative behaviors, like circling and humping, starting up again. It’s entirely the girl rabbit who starts things, now. Do we need to separate them again? Any thoughts on what might have caused their relationship to get worse? Our guess is that the girl rabbit has gained some weight because it’s hard to keep her from eating as much food as the boy (she used to be about a pound smaller, and like 4.5 now) and it may have caused her to think maybe she could take on the male rabbit?We have no evidence a fight has happened, but would hate to see something escalate. Thoughts?

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