A well-designed environment can significantly boost your rabbit’s happiness, leading to a more fulfilling life. Let’s explore ways to turn your home into a rabbit paradise. Blue Cross has good advice on rabbit welfare, plus places to find rescues (to avoid supporting the pet shop industry). Their care is very different to looking after guinea pigs.
Social Needs of Rabbits
Rabbits are often sold (alone) in pet shops, showing that stores have no idea on welfare. Social rabbits need to live with their own kind (neuter males to avoid fighting). Unless already happily living together (in which case offer private hiding places and neuter males), guinea pigs should not be housed with rabbits. Rabbits and guinea pigs communicate differently, and startled rabbits may kick smaller guinea pigs. Rabbits can also pass on a bacteria, that gives guinea pigs respiratory disease.
Rabbit Welfare has lots of good advice. Outdoor rabbits need larger accommodations than a simple ‘hutch’ (with access to outdoor secure runs). Many flowers (like rhododendrons) are toxic to rabbits, guinea pigs and chinchillas (order the book: Gardening with rabbits). Indoor rabbits need special care (to avoid eating through cables).
Download a free (or £1.50 printed) book: On the Hop (50 pages of welfare advice for bunny bliss). The organisation also runs several campaigns including:
- Asking pet stores to stop selling smell hutches
- Asking people to adopt not shop (nearly all vets want bans on sales as rabbits breed so quickly, and rescue centres have run out of space).
- Stop schools having ‘pet rabbits’ (with little welfare knowledge).
- Stop unlicensed selling of rabbits for profit.
Create a Comfortable Living Space
Choosing a hutch that is spacious is crucial. An absolute minimum is at least four times the size of a rabbit when fully stretched, most suggest hutches as big as a smlall shed. With a pen-style safe enclosure that allows safe exploration outside, giving rabbits freedom to safely roam. Made from wood (not plastic or metal) to avoid over-heating. Use quality scent-free hay bedding.
Nutrition for Happy Rabbits
Carrots and lettuce are not natural foods for rabbits (too high in sugar, and never give high-water iceberg lettuce). The natural diet of rabbits is fresh grass (not clippings) and dust-free hay (which helps wear down teeth and enable natural foraging).
Rabbits can dehydrate quickly, so ensure a clean bowl or water bottle (change water daily and ensure bowls don’t get knocked over, and drip-feed bottles are not blocked, nor freeze in winter.
Maintaining a Clean Environment
Clean litter boxes daily to remove soiled bedding and droppings, and weekly clean the hutch with boiled water, to prevent harmful bacteria. Leave to air-dry, before allowing rabbits back inside.
How to Stop Wild Rabbits Eating Crops
Grazers is a Cumbria company that makes a nontoxic calcium product that makes grass unpalatable to rabbits and other creatures. Obviously not for pet rabbits, but it’s a humane deterrent instead of shooting them, which some golf courses and farmers do, to avoid damage to crops or grass.
Just apply as instructed, and rabbits and other creatures should move to other areas. The product was created after seeing extensive rabbit damage stop after applying, which was followed by agricultural and horticultural trials.
Or you could do what no-dig gardener Charles Dowding does, and just accept that you’ll end up sharing some food with your big-footed friends:
Rabbits have discovered our home in the past three weeks. They are surprisingly tame and disinclined to be shooed away. One came up and waved through the window, while we were eating supper.
