bonding advise. . .

[katt]

okay, rather new to the forum, i have 2 rabbits.a mini lop named winnie (she is about 10 months old and fixed) and anenglish lop named herman (about 4 months and not fixed yet. . .notready yet).



anyway, winnie was attempted to bond to a lionhead about 3 weeks aftershe was fixed (she was fixed at 4 months old), it didn't work out, inthe end i had a nasty bite from her and the poor 10 week old lionheadwas scared beyond reason, so the lionhead lives with a friend now andwinnie is once again alone.

i got herman a couple months ago, he was comming home with me andstaying mine if winnie bonded or not. it would be great to get thembonded and have 1 cage, and it would give them someone to play with,but what chance do i have if winnie is so aggressive to other rabbits.she also will charge the cats (i think that is more of protectingherself then just beating them up)?

i don't plan on attempting to bond them till after herman is fixed andhealed up (maybe a month after the snipping takes place). but we didtry to put them together about 1 1/2 months ago, and everything wentokay at first, then winnie started to grunt and lunged at him, takingfur out of poor herman and making him scream. . .we put them both backright then and there and haven't tried again.



do you think my doe is set on being alone? i have a few websites thathave given me ideas on bonding, but could use any advise at all!



thanks

katt

 

[Runestonez]

My hubby and I got off really easy with ourbonding. I don't think it is usually as easy as it was withus but I'll tell you how we approached ours. This is a littlelong and involved so many apologies! All 3 bunns were approx. 11 monthsold at the time.

We adopted our lop Solembum from our local Humane Society. Wehoused him at first in another room altogether because he wasn't fixedat the time and he was mounting anything that wasn't fast enuff to getaway.

We gave him a blankie and our two bonded female Lionheads a blankie fortheir hutch as well. (we were worried about issues over theownership of the hutch, since females tend to be more possessive andthese two were bonded littermates so we wanted to have his scent intheir hutch as much as possible) each morning we would takethe blankies and switch them. (I am not a fan of switchinglitterboxes because our hutch is carpeted and cleaning pee out ofcarpet from an angry bunn is not fun!)

I would spend time with the male and pet him, really rubbing andworking my hands into his fur to get his scent on me. Then Iwould go and spend time with the girls petting and rubbing them totransfer the scent to them. We did this for about 2weeks. We really wanted them to know his scent and be used toit before they met. In this time he went in for hisneuter. (Our girls had been spayed 4 months before so noworries there)

When he came home from his neuter we extended his roaming gorunds to ahallway that joined to the room. They 'accidently' met thru agate that had really small openings...so no one could do anything justpeek or sniff...and not even that really well.They couldn'treally see him; just smell and know something was there!

The next week we moved him to an X-pen in the livingroom next to thegirls(they were in the library at the time). He was locked inwhile they were allowed out and vice versa...the second day the girlswere really freaking out and trying to chew him out of the pen...to thepoint where we were worried about their teeth. So we openedthe door and let him out totally. They were fine.They all sniffed each other thoroughly and ran off into the diningroomtogether and settled down to nap. Since hubby and I werearmed with spray bottles and gloves just in case...this was sort ofanti-climactic.:?

The following day there were tussles between all three while theysettled on a pecking order. Nothing too bad. Justnipping and chasing. They settled into a dominant female,middle male, submissive female pattern and it has remained thatway. There were no issues regarding hutch ownership ortoys...things went very very well...but we also know we got off reallyeasy too! Not alot of bonding goes this well. Wewere prepared to spend as long as it took to make bondingwork.

I hope any of this helps you and answers your question in whole or part!!



Dani, Skittles, Peppers and Solembum.