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Cecil

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Some of you may know I just got my first personal rabbit, a Dutch names Skip :)

Skip is unaltered. I've sat on the floor with his cage open a few times already, just to let him get use to me and the room hes staying in, and he comes out quite willingly. He starts making this low honking sound (I guess it could be described that way) and as soon as he does that I know he's going to come and try to hump my arm or leg. When he does this he bites down pretty hard, almost enough to draw blood but not quite.

Besides this he's a pretty sweet boy so far. With the cage closed I'll stick my finger in and he'll put his head down for me to pet him. He was fine the whole trip home as well, no humping during the car ride.

I will be getting him neutered when I can (and when he's settled in) but I was just wondering if the continuous humping means anything? Is he trying to mark me? Or do I just smell good to a bunny?
And would it be a good idea to discipline him to stop humping until I get him neutered? Or should I just keep the interactions between us short and infrequent until then?
 
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sounds like your little boy has some hormones coursing through his veins. After you get him neutered, it can be about a month or so before those hormones subside. I don't know about the honking, but I would guess that it's attributed to the humping and the hormones. Humping is also a way that they show dominance, but it sounds like his is strictly hormones.
 
Welcome to the teenage bunny months! The honking is his "bunny love song", and the humping is perfectly normal for a teenage male rabbit (as annoying as it can be).

The hormonal behavior will settle down as he matures - Scone MacBunny used to try to hump my arm from the time he was six months. Once he reached maturity at about a year he was much calmer.

You can't "discipline" him, but you can try training him that you are not an appropriate love object, or at least, not in that way. When Scone started to hump my arm, I pushed him back gently and said "NO! Only kiss!". He'd try again, repeat "NO! Only kiss!", and so on - I never rejected him, or put him on the floor or anything, just made it clear that that was not how I wanted to be approached. After about three repetitions he'd hop up tentatively and kiss my hand, and I'd praise him extravagantly. It took a few weeks or more, but after a while he learned that Dad appreciated his love, but humping was out.

It might help to give Skip an outlet for his desires. Scone had a yellow stuffed bunny "girlfriend" named Butter which helped a lot, although he wasn't exactly monogamous. Any stuffed animal with upstanding ears would be knocked flat and humped, including a huge stuffed bunny which he could never quite get on top of. He never was neutered, and lived happily humping anything in the house with uppy ears for seven and a half years.
 
Get him neutered ASAP, you will be SO HAPPY. My life improved markedly once Abe was done! ALL the bad behaviour stopped within a couple weeks.
 
Time to tell your bun the facts of life:laughsmiley:
this time there might be some real playboy bunny magazines under cage( JK.
 

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