Sixth Sense?!

[megrat7]

 

[script removed]

 

Knock on wood, Indy has been problem free for a long time. Until today. I called my bf (who was supposed to be bringing me lunch to work) and he tells me Indy is acting odd. Ok, maybe hes moody I think, becuase sometimes he just wants to be left alone. But he was acting like a scardy baby. My bf went to the closet for something and Indy followed him in, purposfully, and went to hide in the corner. Not normal- he usually likes to be at our feet/smell out shoes in the closet hop around and go out. My bf picks him up and he LETS him. Indy loves affection, but on him terms and usually just being petted on the head, not picked up. Today he wasn’t putting up much of a fight to being held, touched, getting his feet handled or his belly rubbed (he hates that).  So I rushed home from work for a lunch break. When I got home, my bf had him penned in and I sat in with Indy. He laid in my lap and let me pet him all over. He was still pretty docile, but seemed to be improing. During the night before all this he was thumping under our bed a lot and didn’t stop til I put my hand down to pet him.

During the day when he started acting strange, the ONLY thing odd in the house was a lamp was flickering for no reason. But not in the same room as him and I’m not entirely sure he saw it, altho the door may hae been open. Was he sensing something in the past 24hrs that we were not!? The thumping in the middle of the night is not totally uncommon, but it usually wakes me and I can never hear/see whats bothering him. Its a quiet neighborhood and we have a pretty routine schedule around here. I know they have good hearing, but do you ever get the feeling your bunny can sense/see things we cant?!

[FluffyBunny]

Is it possible that he was a little gassy? Have you changed when/what you’re feeding him in the last few days?

It’s also possible that there was a strange noise – like a very high-pitched sound – that you just didn’t hear. This used to happen with one of my bunnies all the time. He’d start acting weird – he’d run around, thump, and stop whatever he was doing. I’d almost always be able to find something that scared him. Sometimes, it was the sound of the dishwasher or clothes dryer upstairs. Sometimes, it was a high-pitched beep. I remember that I figured out that it was a large mouse running by him another time.

[jerseygirl]

He might have been able to hear the lamp playing up more than see it. They have very acute senses. I hope he has settled and it is nothing to do with ill health. I may be a bit paranoid but I’d want to get the electrics checked out…

[RabbitPam]

It’s possible that he had nibbled on the cord a bit, creating an intermittent connection and a bit of a shock to him that may have caused his odd behavior. Unless he is quite normal again this morning, I would have him checked out by the vet. It may be totally unrelated, but it sounds like he is not feeling well.
Is his poo, pee and eating normal today?

[megrat7]

Hes back to his usual self today. Keeping an eye on him, but hopefully whatever it was passed. The lamp is in the next room, he possibly could have seen it from the doorway, but hes not allowed in that room unsupervised… ever, so we had the fence out. And the lamp has stopped flickering. No diet changes/no chewing on anything unusual. Our bedroom is rabbit-proofed. Poo/pee/appetite all in tact.

[Kokaneeandkahlua]

They certainly can sense things we can’t-like for instance hearing…
Species Approximate Range (Hz)
human 64-23,000
dog 67-45,000
cat 45-64,000
cow 23-35,000
horse 55-33,500
sheep 100-30,000
rabbit 360-42,000

So certainly he could be hearing things you can’t -sometimes animals get antzy and we have no idea why-it can be that they are hearing something we can’t. THere is also lots of evidence they sense changes in barometric pressure (associated with changing weather) and it can disturb them as well.

[RabbitPam]

K&K,
That’s cool. Would you please explain what the range means? 360 is so much higher a number. Is that sounds in a low register? Or higher pitched? Or a farther distance? Also, what is the other end? I would guess that it’s distances, because being prey animals they would have the most warning to flee, like from the sky (the sound of wings?), but really have no idea. It also would explain a lot about cows. duh. moo.

[Momto3boys]

Wow, I would like the hearing thing explained as well…that’s really interesting!

[GrumpyBun]

Hertz is the scientific unit for frequency, which pretty much the same thing as pitch, so therefore the higher the frequency, the higher the pitch. It does not refer to a measurement of distance.

[MarkBun]

One of my rabbits can detect earthquakes. She has roughly a 70% success rate for anything over a 2.0. I don’t count anything lower since, well, in the San Francisco bay area, we have about a dozen earthquakes a day but all of them are undetectable by anything other than sensors – or an acute rabbit.

[Kokaneeandkahlua]

&K,
That’s cool. Would you please explain what the range means? 360 is so much higher a number. Is that sounds in a low register? Or higher pitched? Or a farther distance? Also, what is the other end? I would guess that it’s distances, because being prey animals they would have the most warning to flee, like from the sky (the sound of wings?), but really have no idea. It also would explain a lot about cows. duh. moo.

Yeah! Sorry!

It’s Hz- a measure of vibration…because sound is vibration.

so we can hear from 64 to 23000 hz -in fact as we get older we can’t hear the high end as well anymore. Human speech is 2000-5000 hz. So bunnies *can* hear us…they just don’t listen

The range for rabbits is 360-42000 so they can hear almost twice as many frequencies as we can. They can hear ultrasound actually-which begins at about 20 Khz (or 20, 0000 Hz) interestingly. Actually elephants can hear ultrasound too and I believe communicate in it as well.

You’ve likely heard of Decibels-which is Db. THat’s how LOUD a sound has to be for you to hear it. Most humans can hear anything in their range of Hz at 0-5 db. 0 Is the least dB that you can hear something (it’s a log scale).

You can think of pitch as the sound quality of the Hz as mentioned. The lower the Hz, the lower the pitch.

Distance does depend on Hz with lower frequencies being able to travel longer distances, and higher frequencies degrading. Also lower frequencies bend around objects better and thus can be heard farther away. But really the Db level (how loud something is) generally determines how far you can hear it away.

So the Hz range is just how many different types of sound one can hear, and rabbits hear about twice as much as we can! Don’t mistake that they hear something we do as *louder* though-it’s not that way. IT’s just that stuff that makes sounds that we don’t know exists, makes sound to them.

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