fighting is not all that bad. It's normal for the rabbits, but if she actually has injuries on her, then you should separate them. If they are just nipping sometimes and not drawing blood or anything, I would let them work it out and be rabbits.
Honestly, I disagree. Rabbit fights can be mild, but they can also be vicious or even deadly. Unless the rabbits involved are all altered AND fully bonded, it simply isn't truly safe to leave them together unsupervised... and if they *are* altered/bonded, there should NOT be fights serious enough to result in significant amounts of fur pulling - disputes should be fairly rare and be more akin to a bit of bickering than an actual fight. With my girls, there's occasionally a nip on the bootie or a brief chase scene, but never more than that unless there's a legitimate problem with their bond... in which case, I have to get involved and help them repair it (the couple of times it's happened, a playdate on neutral territory solved things).
This happened to our Rose a couple of years ago & we rushed her to the vet. She told us that Rose was nesting. Even though she didn't have another rabbit around it was just an instinct for her to do so. (She wasn't spayed at the time)
As for both the pregnancy and false pregnancy ideas, those didn't actually occur to me... which I suppose is because the OP's description was of "clumps of fur all around the bunnies area". I was under the impression that when a doe pulled fur for a pregnancy (false or legit), it tended to end up in a pile/nest somewhere. However, I've *never* actually witnessed a pregnancy or false pregnancy, so I'm hardly an expert on the matter.
Jennifer: Would molting fur come out in big clumps like that though? In the pic looks like it was pulled right off the bun from one skin area.
...
But when Merls and Rosey got into a scuffle once (sometime while we were all out), there were clumps of fur that looked JUST like that all over the floor. Aside from all the pulled fur, they looked calm and were grooming, so I thought the fight was over... but right after I cleaned up the fur, the little buggers were biting, grunting and flopping around again.
Molting fur coming out on it's own like that? Honestly, I'm not sure it's possible... but I wouldn't rule it out, either, as molts are pretty unpredictable even within the same bunny - one molt can differ greatly from the next. Molts are "anything can happen" wildcards.
However, I can state definitively that if a bunny goes into a molt and isn't being brushed/combed often enough, it's entirely possible that they might pull out their OWN fur in big clumps during the molt and then wisely spit out the mouthful of fur... and that could easily look similar to fighting-related pulled fur.
Many molts start gradually and ramp up, but sometimes a molt will start out already going full-force with the bunny blowing their coat pretty explosively - in the latter situation, the molt can reach a severity that inclines a bunn to pull out molting fur by the mouthful overnight, before you even have a chance to realize they're molting and get on top of grooming the heck out of them... leading to a delightful game of analyzing hair clumps, watching behavioral clues like a hawk and furminating the heck out of the bunns so that you can determine ASAP whether the fur clumps resulted from a fight or a molt. I've had multiple false alarms where I got paranoid, suspecting a fight, only to have it turn out to be a violent molt.
The other reasons why I was inclined to suspect molting over fighting:
~ As I said, fighting of that severity tends to escalate to the point that it gets witnessed pretty quickly (like in your example, where you thought the fighting was over only to have it turn around and start right back up again).
~ Having been through the ordeal of an abruptly broken bond before, my own experience has taught me that the fighting happens pretty frequently until the bond is repaired; while it's easy to not witness the initial fight because you happen to not be around, it's never very long before you catch a subsequent fight in the act.
~ Molting happens far more often than bonds break
~ Rabbits who are not truly bonded and/or are unaltered and have reached sexual maturity ARE fairly inclined to have unexpected bursts of fighting... but since they should never be left alone together in those situations, there's theoretically no reason for fighting to be high on the list of probable causes.
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The TLDR of ALL of the responses in the thread is this: we're really just all tossing out random theories/possibilities based on our own experiences involving "clumps of fur". There's some interesting brainstorming going on but absolutely no way to narrow down the possibilities, let alone agree on a "most likely culprit", without more information.
At this point, any of us could be right, any of us could be wrong and for that matter, NONE of us could be right.
So pretty much... answers to the following questions would be immensely helpful and might allow us to help you get to the bottom of things:
~ How many rabbits are housed in "the bunnies' area"?
~ What are their ages?
~ What are their genders?
~ Are they ALL spayed/neutered?
~ Have they ALL been properly bonded together?
~ How long ago did you start finding the clumps of fur?
~ Have you witnessed ANY signs of fighting, chasing or even just general dissension between Flopsy and another bunny in the time since first seeing fur clumps?
~ Does the fur seem to be coming from all over, or from a particular part of her body (for example, a rabbit pulling fur for a false or real pregnancy would pull primarily from their dewlap (neck) area and perhaps chest/stomach)?
[Also, if it's not too much trouble, a picture showing the general appearance of her coat (bird's eye view is probably ideal) could potentially be helpful in regards to ruling molting in or out.]
Anyone else have any relevant questions to add that I've overlooked?