Fighting, unsure what to do

[CatapultJesus]

Backstory: two adult, fixed rabbits. Gus (boy) we’ve had for a long time. Lacey (girl) we’ve had for a couple months. On their first date before adopting Lacey, they seemed like they would be perfect. No aggression from either.

We’ve had Lacey’s pen next to Gus’, so they’re constantly around each other. They can exist near each other mostly fine when separated, though Lacey can fixate and follow Gus when he goes by, and will try to nip at him if he gets to close. I don’t know if this is a bad sign or what it means… But we’ve also swapped their pens, put him in hers and vice versa, for a few hours at a time several times now and noticed no excessive chinning or territorialness with it.

We’ve tried bonding them in the bathtub over a couple weeks. There would be some nipping back and forth, Gus would lunge a bit if she got too close, and she would sometimes nip if he wasn’t paying attention to her. Progress was extremely slow if at all. The problem became though that Gus haaaaates to be picked up and gets super stressed afterwards. So the more often we’d pick him up for bathtub dates, the more impatient, stressed, and anxious he’d get towards Lacey in there. This got to the point where he would get anxious any time we came near, and would growl and box at me if I tried to pet him. He wouldn’t be himself after being handled so many days in a row, he’d be noticeably upset, irritable, and worrying.

So we gave him a bit of time to cool off, he seems happy again. And we tried a new technique: lure him into an area that is semi neutral, pen him up, put Lacey in it. We thought maybe if we gave them a bit more space in a less stressful environment, they could just go about their day and have better results. Instead we got fights. We’re vacuuming tuffs of fur off our floor, and I’m tending a bite wound where one latched onto my hand for a good 15 seconds (rookie mistake, I know).

We don’t know what to do. Did we screw up with environment? Do we try something else? Do they hate each other? Did we do something wrong? We’re just lost. Looking for any kind of advice at all. Suggestions. A plan. What to try next. Help. Please.

We love them both and hate to think we got an incompatible pair.

[Melissa Rabbit]

ugh. that sounds so discouraging! im sorry youre hitting road blocks, but i dont think your buns are incompatible. sounds like they were just under stress and that caused things to go wonky. i had a very similar experience.

i worried about the same thing when i was bonding a male and female–Annie HATED being picked up and basically being anywhere that wasnt her pen, so bringing them to a neutral place didn’t seem feasbile. i wound up putting off the bonding process for a few months.

then i moved and they had to share an x-pen. they both had their own pen with their own things, but one bun had access to the x-pen part of the day and the other had access the other part of the day. their shared space became their neutral place. after a while, i noticed they would lay next to each other with the fence in between–one in the x-pen and the other in their own pen. one day i saw what appeared to be grooming and started back up with the bonding process. they bonded very quickly after that.

whole process, from adoption to bond, took about 8 months, so don’t be discouraged if it feels like you’re not making progress!

[sarahthegemini]

You need to let Lacey settle in and then pre bond for at least a month. It doesn’t sound like you did that?

In terms of transporting them to the neutral area – you could try using a carrier.

[CatapultJesus]

She prebonded for about six weeks before we started dating. We made an area for Lacey’s (the newer rabbit) pen right next to what has always been Gus’pen. Gus doesn’t seem to care, even though this has previously all been his space, but the longer we’ve been prebonding, the more Lacey seems like she might be getting territorial of her area. Like I said in the original post, She follows Gus when he’s close and will nip at him if he puts his nose near her fence. I read in the prebonding part on this site that it can be a thing for the old bun to get upset when a new bun is prebonded nearby, but is it possible for the new bun to begin thinking this area is hers and get territorial herself? I could be misreading, but I’m looking for anything.

The carrier is what we’re going to try for transporting next. It might help. I’m unsure though as Gus hates the carrier and isn’t stupid, he sees it and hides. He won’t enter on his own and by the time we gently nudge him in, he seems just as pissed as he is when we pick him up. But we haven’t come up with other options yet so we’ll have to try and see.

If there’s anything else I should share or if you have any questions of what we’ve done, please ask. I often post on places like reddit and find the more info and longer your post is, the less likely people will bother to read and help, so I’m hesitant to dump more info than I may actually need to.

[Sirius&Luna]

I would do more prebonding where you swap them between areas every other day – if you just put them in each other’s areas for a few hours at a time, then they still keep an area that is theirs. But if you swap them daily, they stop hanging on to the idea that one of the spaces is mine and the other is theirs.

I know you’ve prebonded for 6 weeks, but sometimes it does take longer. I had one bun who I got in June, and they weren’t bonded until October (I was also waiting for neutering, but it took a long time for the existing bunny to stop being aggressive through bars). While there’s nipping through bars, I wouldn’t attempt bonding.

For bunnies that don’t like to be transported, you can try picking him up in his litter tray too? But make sure you don’t leave the litter tray in the bonding space.

It could also be that the bathtub is a super stressful environment, and that isn’t working for them. Could you try the bathroom floor instead? You do sometimes need to try a few different things. I’m currently bonding my bunnies on a table, because for some reason it immediately gets negative on the bathroom floor.

I would also stop the semi neutral, since presumably their first positive date at the rescue was totally neutral.

So, in short, I would prebond until there’s no sign of aggression, then try different spaces. You can also be very involved – pet them both when they get near each other to diffuse negativity before it happens.

[CatapultJesus]

We just got so discouraged yesterday that we were worrying we ruined things or had no hope of getting these two together. We needed some guidance. Your ideas seem helpful and are exactly what we’ll try next, then move very slowly from there. Thank you.

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