Are we projecting here?

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We had Kimchi neutered last Tuesday, which will be one week ago as of tomorrow. He's really bounced back well - from the procedure and anesthesia.

However, we feel that he may be "pissed off" at us. I know that is probably anthropomorphize-ing and/or projecting, but it seems like he is at least a little upset with us. My wife said she has especially noticed it since she has been around him more than I have, but we've both noticed it. :( We assume he's put it all together now. Frankly I've felt a bit guilty about it and I know intellectually that it's a good thing for him and for us, and for us all together, to be neutered in the long run. Not to mention hopefully getting him bonded with a buddy.

Now I know that you guys are experienced folks but perhaps also biased in your thinking in the same way I am. ;-) Nevertheless:

Do you think rabbits have these sorts of emotive thinking or what have you?

What changes can we expect to see?

BTW we think he is around 7 to 10 months old, probably around 8 or 9 specifically. (We don't know since we inherited from someone who also didn't know and couldn't find out.) He never sprayed or humped us or anything else that we could see.

He has been more or less back to his usual routines both when confined to his pen while we are away or asleep. He has been much less binky-prone and when he does, they are small and halfhearted. I'm hopeful he will bounce back and I know it has not been long and that it takes up to 8 weeks for the hormones to be eliminated entirely.

Thoughts welcomed, thanks!
 
Some rabbits digest a bad experience faster than others. About ten days ago, Aki had to go to the vet and be hospitalized for 24h because her guts had stopped and I wasn't there (of course, she became ill when I was away for 5 days :rollseyes). As a result, her husbunny stayed alone in an empty house during that time. Then, Aki went back home and the petsitter had to administer her treatment until I came back. Of course, when I got home both of them fled whenever they saw me and were super nervous. Aki got over it after a few days despite having suffered the most, but Tybalt is still pretty nervous. He will hide if he feels like I watch him (even from the other side of the closed window!) and has been stumping his feet and roughing up the petcarrier which is, as it has been for the past three years, set on the floor on one corner of the room. He will get over it eventually but, you know... my females were always more resilient than the males I've had no matter the species (my dog, cat and one bunny are males and they are all big softies who are easily traumatized by nothing whereas my doe and my female tortoise are both tough cookies... just saying XD)
No but joking aside, your bunny is at the awkward stage of entering adulthood, his hormones are waning but still there and he had a very strange and kinda scary experience after which he probably hurt a bit without knowing why. Don't feel guilty, you did what was best for him. I feel horrible everytime I take mine to the vet but you know... they would be thankful if they knew. Give him a few weeks and he should be fine ^^.
 
Thanks guys - we have hope that he will fully rebound to his old self over time. I will update this thread periodically.
 
I am happy to report, Kimchi is definitely pretty much back to his old self. Big binkies, lots of dashing about, and doing his laps/circuits - around the pen when he's in there, around the living room, and now even out on the patio, around the patio, and around the living room. He wore himself out last night playing with my wife!
 
Speaking as someone in the field of animal behaviour:

Generally, attributing motivations to animal behaviour is wrong. "He's doing this because he knows..." is attributing emotions/behaviours like "spite", "deviousness", "maliciousness", "disobedience", "disrespect", and so on, which require a level of mental thinking animals aren't capable of. Cause and effect is especially something that they often can't comprehend to the level we think.

Animals can be very smart, but consider that often animal intelligence is measured in comparison to human development: "as smart as a 4 year old child", for example. So it's almost always best to try and consider animal behaviour in terms of very small children. The younger you go, the less mentally capable they are of making logical leaps. For instance, the reason babies love peek-a-boo so much is that they lack "object permanence"—literally they can't conceive of the existence of something they can't see. When you hide your face from a baby, as far as they're concerned you are suddenly gone. 4 year old children don't understand conservation of mass: they will always think a tall thin glass contains more liquid than a short fat glass; they will consider several small pieces to be more than one large piece, and so on. It takes months before babies even comprehend simple cause and effect such as "when I grab something I can bring it closer to me."

So, all the time, people say "my dog knows he's not allowed on the couch, but the moment no ones in the room he immediately disobeys and jumps up onto it!" Etc etc variations of "they wait until I'm not looking to do what they know they shouldn't!!"

Well, no, your dog knows no such thing. They don't understand English. And dogs in particular are awful at generalization. To them, it's all about context. A dog that has been taught many tricks, but only in the kitchen, will often be completely unable to perform in the hallway. Because the commands only mean something to them in the kitchen! So all these dogs know is "this rewarding behaviour is punished when the human is present. Therefore I must only do it when they are not present." "Disobedience" requires a mental level of consideration of cause and effect, and understanding of future possibilities, that dogs don't have. Dogs are all about what behaviours will be rewarded, and in what contexts behaviours will be punished. That's all. If you're commanding come, and there's a squirrel, they chase the squirrel because "human is telling me to come so I will—OH MY GOD A SQUIRREL I WILL CATCH YOU SQUIRREL COME HERE SQUIRREL!!", not because they've deliberately weighed their options and decided to disobey. Again; think small children. Often small children with severe ADHD.

For rabbits, their mental quirk is associations: they make incredibly strong positive and negative associations. For instance, bonding two rabbits together is all about creating positive associations. You feed them at the same time where they can see each other, so that they associate the happiness of food. You take them on car rides so that they take comfort from each other. And you never ever let them in a situation where they might harm each other. Once they fight, they may never forgive each other.

But even to say "never forgive each other" is attributing a level of thought they likely don't have. Forgiveness requires understanding of past wrongs, consideration of moving past them, etc etc. More likely, the bunnies just see each other and have a sense of "YOUUUUU!! You are pain/hurt/bad/intruder and I HATE YOU!" And then every time they have an encounter that results in aggressiveness and agitation, that association is strengthened.

So does your bunny resent you for having him neutered? Almost certainly not. But, he's likely in pain, and that makes him unfriendly. His hormones are doing some strange things, so he's acting strangely.

But there could be some associations going on: hands reached for him, and picked him up, and he went to a scary place that ended up hurting a lot, so now he associates hands with bad things. That's a bit of a stretch, and animals rarely have the kind of memory to associate such separate events as "being picked up" and "hours later was in pain". But rabbits as a whole often hate being picked up, because of how scary it is, and if they aren't handled regularly to desensitize them then it can be a huge reaction. There's very little that's positive enough about being picked up to overcome the negative association of fear. Delilah loves being pet, but the moment she feels a hand go under her tummy she knows she's about to be picked up, and often tries to get away.

So it's entirely likely that with his recent medical experience, he's currently associating hands and people with being picked up and being scared more than anything else. And being picked up is even worse when you're in pain, so he's avoiding even the possibility of being picked up.

For sure I'll often make comments about my bunny's behaviour: "Don't touch food to Delilah's mouth or she'll think you're trying to poison her." But that's a shorthand for explaining her behaviour without explaining the cause: when she was spayed, she had to take regular antibiotics. She'd never been handled regularly before, so suddenly she was in pain, and being grabbed and lifted and having things shoved in her face and forced into her mouth and she was being forced to eat something and as a whole it was an extremely traumatic experience.

Just like being handled, being medicated is something that is scary but, as it doesn't actually hurt, repeated exposure to the scary experience without a result of pain results in desensitization. But, just as Delilah was starting to get used to it, the antibiotics were done, so she never got over her negative association. She wasn't medicated again until she came down with GI stasis, when she was in pain and scared etc etc, when not only was I forcing critical care down her throat, but also regular hay, water, food, constantly trying to get her to eat. So Delilah now has an extremely strong association between something being shoved in front of her mouth, and feelings of fear and pain. Thus, she makes a convincing show of being offered poison.

To take that series of events further, she behaves the same way when faced with a banana. Weird, since most bunnies love banana, but if you offer a piece of banana to Delilah she recoils as though it were toxic. Sure enough, the vet confirmed that some of their antibiotics are banana flavoured.

Does Delilah remember her spay procedure from 5 years ago? Surely not. But the experience was so negative that sensations that were associated with the experience—having things shoved in front of her mouth, the taste of banana—are all branded as BAD NO DO NOT WANT in her mind.

In this case, some patience and judicious application of treats will soon have him thinking positively of you again. Also I'd like to stress, when it comes to negative associations: breaking them just requires them encountering the situation enough times without anything bad happening. I've started picking Lahi and Delilah up once a day, and making them eat food from my hand while held. Delilah is a harder nut to crack, but Lahi now knows that if I'm holding him, which he hates, and I put food in front of his face, he needs to eat some of it in order to be put down. Being held is more negative than food is positive, so they can't come to enjoy being held by being rewarded with food. However, the removal of a negative stimulus is called negative reinforcement, and is a type of reward. "Get put down" as a reward for "eat this food" means now that Lahi is used to eating while being held, and next time he comes down with GI stasis it won't be such a hassle to encourage him to eat.

So what I'm saying is that he may currently be avoiding you due to an association with being handled, so you'll want to hold off on that for a while... but you also want to get him used to being handled while he's healthy, so that it won't be so traumatic and difficult when he's not. If you only handle him when there's trouble/he's potentially sick/hurt/etc, being handled will continue to be strengthened as a bad thing.
 
Animal behaviour is literally what I've dedicated my life to so sorry for the lecture ^_^
 
Now as much as I caution against attribution, I will say from personal experience that rabbits are a LOT more intelligent than they're given credit for.

My sister taught her horse to give kisses on command, by giving him a treat when he allowed her to guide his mouth up to her face. Now when she makes a kissy noise, he bumps his mouth against her face. Being a 1200 lbs animal that can often feel like getting punched in the face rather than kissed, but I figured that wouldn't be a problem with my 5 lbs rabbits.

I decided against teaching Lahi, because he's really against getting touched and he's not that food motivated. I'd previously tried to get him to learn to enjoy being touched by feeding him when I pet him, and he was simply patient enough to wait for me to cave and feed him his dinner, rather than let me touch him. So I decided to only teach Delilah, who honestly would probably jump through fire for food.

I'd hold kibble in my fingers near my face, and she'd have to reach up to get it. Once she was reaching up, I'd hide it a bit below my chin, and give it to her once she inspected my face. Then I'd narrow it down until she only got the food when she inspected my mouth, and on until she had to make contact to get the food. This type of training is called "shaping", and involves "rewarding successive approximations of the desired behaviour." Eventually she was reaching up and giving me the most perfect kisses in return for food. This took probably about a month.

The golden rule for training is that it's best to do it just before mealtime; due to something called "salience". Basically, you can reward a kid for good behaviour with a chocolate bar, but when is that going to have the most effect: in the middle of August, or on November 1st when they've just gorged themselves with Halloween candy? Doing training just before mealtime increases the salience of the food as a reward, and results in much more efficient training.

So this whole month that I was training Delilah, Lahi was patiently waiting for his food. It was dinner time, he knew it was dinner time, and he had to sit and watch as Delilah got food and he didn't. He got his food eventually, and as mentioned he is a patient bunny. But I guess one day his patience ran out.

Without warning, as I was in the midst of training Delilah, Lahi hopped over, stood up, and smacked a perfect kiss on my chin. Then he sat back, eyeing me, waiting for his treat.

I'd never trained him to do this, he did it entirely without prompting, and that absolutely blows me away. Observational learning requires a level of mental thinking rarely attributed to animals.

In order for this to work, this is what must have been going on in Lahi's mind: "Its dinner time, I want food. I will be getting food. If I wait, soon food will come. Delilah is getting food, but I am not. I want to get food like Delilah does. Delilah gets food when she does that certain thing. She only gets food when she does that certain thing. If I did that certain thing, perhaps I would also get food!"

First of all, to recognize Delilah as a thinking entity independent from himself requires a "sense of self". He has to comprehend himself as an individual, and others as individuals different from himself. That ALONE is phenomenal. 4 year old children, for example, suffer from "egocentrism", where they can't comprehend a world experience that isn't their own. They will insist that a person's left hand is the hand on THEIR left, regardless of which way the person faces, for instance. So Lahi recognizing that Delilah was an individual like himself currently experiencing a situation unlike himself is amazing.

Then, someway, somehow, he managed to consider the possibility that he could affect his situation to match hers. He *imagined* that he could put himself in her situation and achieve the same results. That's imagination, empathy, and... comprehension of cause and effect. When she does X, Y happens. If I tried to do X, perhaps Y would happen for me!

And then he observed what she was doing closely enough to successfully mimic her. Further imagination, further sense of self, indications of planning, concept of the future, imagining potential consequences...

It's not something that seems very significant to us, and for a human child it wouldn't be anything but a natural step of mental development, but for an animal it's an indication of problem-solving that, in much of the scientific world, is what defines "intelligence".

Dogs can memorize hundreds of commands, which is impressive, sure. But what amazes scientists is when Rico the border collie learns the name of a new object through process of elimination, seeing a number of objects he already knows the name of and concluding that the new word must refer to the new object. Problem solving is how researchers identify intelligence in animals.

Always remember to avoid attributing motivations—we can't say that Lahi was jealous of Delilah, or that he thought it was unfair he wasn't getting food. We can only say that he wanted food and conceived of a scenario where he might get some. There have been experiments showing the concept of "unequal pay for equal work" in monkeys—the videos are highly entertaining, I reccomend watching them—but to attribute the motivation of "this is unfair" to Lahi would definitely be projecting. But at the same time, give credit where credit is due: ask yourself, what reward is the animal seeking/what punishment is the animal avoiding? And stick to Occam's razor for the explanations.
 
I think it's just a mixture of his calmer nature since getting back and your guilt making you think he is mad at your or holding a grudge. I will say it has only been a week since his surgery. Now if he is still acting this way a month from now then there may be something wrong. But think how much stress any animal feels from surgery. It's a big deal and he should start coming around soon. You may also have to account from slight pain from the surgery site could be why he is not binkying and this is a good thing as it takes time for proper healing
 
Liung, my rabbits have demonstrated the same thing -- tricks that I've taught Bouncealot, Mabari has figured out just by watching (and she's more food-motivated so when he gets leery and won't come give kisses, she charges over to they can get fed lol)
 
Thanks for the replies! Thanks Liung in particular for the thoughtful and lengthy responses. I really enjoyed reading through them. Are you an animal psychologist or researcher by trade?

Firstly let me say that Kimchi is really almost back to his usual self. I'd say he is about 95% of the way there - the dashing about in the mornings and evenings has resumed, as have the binkies. He's getting there.

I am reading through Marit Emilie Buseth's incredible book, Rabbit Behaviour, Health and Care, and she has a passage that mentioned one rabbit's tendency to "tease" her owner by chewing on wooden table legs only during the evening when she is relaxing watching TV. She seems to do it in order to make her owner chase her around and play a bit; the rabbit does not chew on the furniture unless she is there (contrary to many of our experiences, I am sure!).

I know that our bun knows that he should not be on our dining room table. He looks over at us when he is on one of the chairs around the table and if he sees us, he generally does not get up there. However, if we are out of sight, he gets up there and immediately gets down when he hears us approaching. So he is reasoning and he knows that we will chase him down from there, but that is more cause and effect than it is a motivation for a particular reason. In fact the motivation is probably that he remembers that sometimes there is fruit up there ... for example last week while working from home one day (I work at the table), I went to use the bathroom for a few minutes and returned to find him eating on my banana that I was about to have for breakfast! See the attached picture of Kimchi caught red handed. ����

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Mmmm, I have a psychology degree and I'm currently working on a masters in animal behaviour and welfare! And I just got a job in an animal research facility. Becoming a researcher myself is the dream!

Well, as I and obviously other rabbit owners have noted, rabbits definitely have a good concept of cause and effect, to the extent of "if I do this, this will happen" at least. So yeah, if he enjoys being chased he very well could be doing it for that reason. But most rabbits LOVE bananas, so that's also likely a motivation.

Think about it like this: he only gets on the table when you're around... but there's also only usually food on the table when you're around! You being near the table is the discriminatory stimulus (the flag that prompts a behaviour that only occurs in the presence of that flag) for him to go up and check if you've put food there.

(I hope it's not a very tall table? Rabbits are perfectly capable of jumping four feet straight up but four feet straight down worries me a lot.)

Here's another example of cause and effect: as you may or may not know, staring at each other is a very pleasing social activity for rabbits.

I've heard from several people that give their rabbits full run of the house that their bun has a particular favourite spot to lounge: right in front of the TV. Because, of course, they get stared at by their humans for HOURS!!

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Lahi doesn't sit RIGHT in front of the TV but lets face it when he does this he's definitely going to get stared at. Because he's **** cute.
 
But also remember to be careful to attribute "knowledge" to an animal. Rabbits are territorial creatures, so they are better than most animals at understanding "you are not allowed here because this is mine", but remember the example of the dog on the couch: the dog does not understand "not allowed on the couch ever", he only understands "not allowed on the couch when humans are around". Nothing happens when he gets on the couch and humans aren't around, so why should he think that sitting on the soft, comfy couch that smells like his favourite people is a bad thing?

Rabbits definitely understand the concept of my space vs your space, and they also definitely love pushing boundaries—you know the thing they do, when they're trying to creep into a place they've never been allowed to go before...

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So it very well may be that Kimchi understands that he is not allowed on the table, and that by being on the table he's breaking that rule, and that's why he dashes off when you approach... but it could also be that, as he's allowed in the dining room, he doesn't see the table as separate from the rest of the room, and like the dog, is of the understanding that it is your presence in the that indicates that the table is not a place he should be.

Functionally it doesn't make much of a difference in behaviour, but in one scenario you are attributing a quality to him—deliberate disobedience.

For a dog, that's not a fair attribution. They are incredibly good natured animals that are not spiteful or malicious, and behave entirely according to the associations they have made for desired and undesired outcomes. They don't have guile.

Do rabbits? We don't know yet. But we should be careful to attribute motivations to them based on our own human understanding of a situation, because it colours how we view the animal and how we behave with the animal. I've seen too many people be horribly strict and harsh with dogs that they see as "disobedient" because they don't try to view their dog's behaviour through the lens of a dog's psychology, instead of a human psychology. Or alternatively, people whose dogs run completely wild and aggressive because "he's just playing!!"

I literally had a man tell me it was absolutely okay for me to pet his dog, directly after his dog straightened, stopped wagging his tail, closed his mouth, and made direct eye contact with me. I stopped dead and quickly averted my gaze and I'm pretty sure that's the only reason the dog only snarled and lunged a little before sniffing me, instead of actually biting. "It's fine, it's fine, he's friendly!!" No dude, your dog just telegraphed aggressiveness and nearly bit me, please do not encourage people to approach a dog who obviously feels extremely threatened by people approaching. He was a big dog too, a standard poodle.
 
That is a great anecdote and I love your picture of Lahi in front of the fireplace! I love the comic of the bunny stretching into the unknown room - I've totally seen that!

That is interesting that they enjoy staring at one another. We've seen that with Kimchi too. He also "watches TV" with us, generally he faces us on the couch while we face the TV. He loves to be in the middle of the action - he will sit roughly equidistant between my wife and I.

Sometimes he does seemingly watch TV ... here's an example. You can see mine and my wife's feet, plus Kimchi - we love this picture. Evindently Kimchi likes reruns of The Office!

Note, that is his travel cage on the right there, he doesn't live in there.

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