littl3red wrote:
My boyfriend still doesn't believe that Teddy's that intelligent.
Time for a new boyfriend it seems, unless the bunny gives him the OK.
BunBun Rwa has his videos on YouTube in order to show what a rabbit can do.
The lads walk up to a mile a day without a leash, frequently at night. Try that with your average dog and it will be gone. It can be literally a car stopper when people realize that they are seeing rabbits out for a walk and not small dogs.
BunBun will do a 1/4 mile jog with a neighbor, play ball and go after cats. The lads will chase dogs. OK maybe there is only one dog so far that they actually chase, but they frequently stare down a pair of beagles and a pair of yappy chihuahuas.
They have complex personalities and emotions and continue to surprise me with how much they have learned and how they express it. One recent example is that sometimes they disobey my "commands" and disappear into the neighbors hedge. They don't come out if I stay on the sidewalk to call, but if I go open the gate to the backyard and call, they come hopping right out and go intoour backyard lickety-split.
The best way that I can discribe them is like autistic savants. They can be wickedly smart, but effective communication can be challenging and how they comply with "commands" can be a unique expression of their personality and mood. As in the above example with the hedge and the gate, they are frequently willing to come to a mutually satisfactory accomodation with you, but it can be quite a challenge to discover what that quid pro quo actually is.
Rabbits can be QUITE headstrong and I would say that you will most likely not be successful if you try to break a rabbit to your will. Taking BunBun for walks is how I stopped him from sneaking out of the yard and running away from me once he did so. He was like a puppy dog following me around in the backyard and coming over to me, but when he decided to sneak into the front yard it was a different story. My attempts to stop that behavior did not work and had the unintended consequence of making him run from me once he made it into the front yard because he did not want his neighborhood explorations cut short. It was like flipping a switch; in the backyard he was all over me and in the front yard he would run like the wind down the sidewalk from me. After a LOT of mutually disagreeable discipline to try to break him of that behavior, it finally occured to me that if I met his desire for exploring the neighborhood perhaps he would behave as he did in the back yard. In other words, BunBun trained me to take him for walks instead of me training him to stay in the back yard. I was owned by a bunny.
