Best living arrangements until doe is spayed

[Jwaitkus]

Hi All



First post. Glad to find such a good resource.

My family and I (wife and kids 3,5,8) have a 6 month old Netherlands Dwarf. We keep him in our living room and when we are home he is free to play in living room. He has quite the personality. He loves to come up and run around us when we are sitting on the floor and has a blast playing with our cat. We had him neutered today.



We would like to get another bunny both for him and us. We have the opportunity to get an 8 week old Holland Lop doe. We fully understand we need to wait until she is spayed to start the bonding process which is probably around to 8 weeks away.

Our questions:

• What is the best method for this?
• Should we keep them out of site from each other or can her cage be in the living room so they can see each other. Would it cause issues to allow outside time while the other is in their cage or should they be completely separated in different parts of our home?

Thanks,



Jared

 

[Blue eyes]

Welcome to the forum!

It could take your newly neutered boy as much as 6-8 weeks from now for his hormones to fully dissipate. Any bond attempts should wait until then. The key factor to bonding is that your boy rabbit needs to be the one choosing his bondmate.

For this reason, I would strongly advise against getting a baby female. This is rather risky because not all rabbits will bond with each other. By getting a baby, you become committed to trying to make that one particular rabbit work. But first she needs to be spayed (costly, as I'm sure you know) and healed before the process can start. If it just doesn't work out and they refuse to bond, then what? House them both separately? There is never any guarantee that two individual rabbits will get along. Some absolutely refuse.

If you'd like a bondmate for your boy, the best (and only) way to ensure that you wind up with a compatible pair is to find other already fixed rabbits from a rabbit rescue and pre-screen for potential compatibility. By working with a rescue, they help you to pre-screen. And then when the real bonding process begins at home, if it ends up that the two rabbits refuse to get along, the rescue typically allows you to try a different rabbit. This is more common than many assume. I have personally had to do this a few times with a couple different rabbits (different times) that refused to get along with a potential bondmate.

The added advantages of going through a rescue is that - with fixed rabbits - the personality of that rabbit is evident. Baby personalities are not a true reflection of what will be their adult personality and early handling is not going to change that personality. Also, fixed rabbits usually cost less than the cost of a spay, so it saves money (not to mention stress and hassle of having the procedure done).

You can read more about bonding here. That should give you further info to consider.

Here's a link with a number of females ready to adopt (in Mass):
http://www.rabbitnetwork.org/adoption/bachelorettes/
(Remember, any size or breed rabbit has the potential to bond with any other size or breed. It's up to the rabbits.)