It’s up to you to train your bunny, it won’t do it itself
Bunnies pick up bad behaviours before you can focus on training them to do anything. If they are living with other bunnies, the bad behaviours will escalate.
Bunnies are also defiant. They flick their tail to let you know that they don’t want to do what you want them to.
But bunnies are smarter than dogs, and more cluey than a detective, they can pick things up even before you realise they have. So it is important that you jump on bad behaviours and promote good ones right from the start.
It is easy to think “it’s only a rabbit”, but that’s going to turn into a bigger issue in the long term because you’ve already given it leeway.
This article should give you some ideas about what to do, right from the start, no matter if you are getting a baby bunny, or an adult rescue, these tried-and-tested methods will help.
Yes, they are smart. You are fooling yourself if you think otherwise
Bunnies are smarter than the smartest dog, they just learn differently, slower, more methodical. Dogs learn fast and efficiently, while bunnies think about each alternative and make considerations about all possibilities before they react. But when a treat is involved, you’ll see a different side of your bunny, and if it’s a treat that they like, they will do anything for it.
Like a well trained dog, you can have a well trained bunny. It just takes time and patience. A loooong time, a month or more to learn a single trick properly. While a dog could learn the same thing in a day or two.
Bunnies don’t come with knowing the house rules, you have to teach them what is expected. They are good at following rules if they agree to them. Always make rules easy to understand by using a set vocabulary. “Let’s go outside”, “Want some grass?”, “In the car”, “Brushy-brushy”. Once they know what the words mean you will see them react to them according to the rules.
Write a list of behaviours you want
Write a list of all the behaviours you want to promote and all the ones you don’t want. That way you can focus on promoting those behaviours you want, and all your family members know what to do if they see a bad behaviour. You need everyone’s support in the start.
This may sound silly but it seriously helps – especially if you’ve never had a bunny before. A list keeps the items in the front of your brain, and when you see something you don’t like, you can act on it straight away. But knowing what you think is good and bad behaviours means you can snip things in the bud really quickly from the start.
Remember that your bunny will have a personality, but that’s a quirk that you’ll have to learn to cope with. Every bunny is different.
Bunnies only learn through positive reinforcement. Always have a “good boy/girl” or a pat handy. And, if they do something really good, a treat tops the day off nicely.
When training a bunny, praise the good behaviours and ignore the bad ones. It’s hard to do, sometimes, but it is necessary. If they don’t get a rise out of you, they will stop repeating those behaviours.
If the bunny gets too much, for example it doesn’t stop chewing the carpet and you don’t know what to do, changing the situation will help. So move furniture around, or put the bunny in a different room, maybe take it outside for a walk or playtime. By changing the situation immediately, the bunny will forget what it was doing. The danger to that is it might remember when it returns. That’s when you have to take more serious changes and start thinking about preventative measures, and re-training.
Everyone’s list will be different. Once you have a basic list, you can break it down further and think about the actual behaviours you want, and then you have a clearer vision of what you expect. But don’t expect the bunny to have other animal behaviours, like a dog or cat. They are rabbits, and have specific behaviours, you’re just setting the rules.
Then when the bunny displays the behaviours you don’t want, change the subject by leading it into another room, or giving it a toy or blanket to play with. Don’t pick the bunny up because it will start linking bad behaviours with being picked up and it won’t like being picked up, or it will think that to get picked up it needs to do those things.
Be very careful with how you deal with behaviours in the start, because that’s what sets boundaries and rules for the rest of its life.
It is possible to re-train bunnies, it just takes a lot of time.
Behaviours you may need help with
Picking up your bunny
It’s well known that some bunnies just don’t like being picked up. That is because something happened in the past that made it scared or hurt it. Sometimes it happens before you get your bunny and you have no idea what caused it.
You can spend a lot of time letting your bunny trust you to pick it up, but you have to start as soon as you get the bunny, no matter it’s age.
It’s easier to train a bunny to not mind being picked up when you get it as a baby, but with an older rescue or a bunny who has been re-homed, it can be a little more difficult. But it knows you are a different person to its previous owner and you have all the right in the world to treat it differently. You have the bunny’s permission to do so, but if you don’t you will miss your opportunity and it will slip back into old routines and opinions.
I’d start doing what I want with the bunny after about two hours after arriving home with it. Give it time to relax after the car ride, then pick it up and cuddle it. Start talking to it, clicking your teeth like you’re purring, showing it around, meeting family members. Don’t take it outside yet, though. Keep it calm, and if it starts struggling, sit down with it and gently pat it.
Wrapping the bunny up in a blanket burrito is also a good idea. Bunnies like being snuggled in soft blankets.
Catching your bunny
No matter what, never chase after your rabbit. It will stir up a confusing concoction of innate emotions and they will not like you very much, and may start distrusting you.
If they run away from you, don’t chase them. Turn around and walk away a few steps, then wait. After a while your bunny will come and check out what you are doing. They are very curious.
If you have a hard time catching your bunny, just stop. Change the subject. Get the hose out and hose a plant, low to the ground. Grab a tool like a small spade or something and dig in the dirt. Act like a human rabbit. Do a rabbit activity at rabbit level. You will get heaps of attention, even if it is after a while.
When the bunny comes to you, don’t reach for it. Just talk to it. Tell it that it is good for coming to you. Don’t look at it, continue doing what you are doing.
It will go away, come back, go away on repeat. Just keep doing something interesting. It doesn’t matter if you change your activity, as long as it is something at bunny height – low to the ground.
Go and get some pellets or a food your bunny loves eating and put it next to you on the ground. Don’t touch the food again. Let the bunny eat for a little while then slowly reach out to pat it. It may jump away, it may not. You’ve won if it doesn’t jump away. But don’t pick the bunny up. Just gently pat it and talk to it. Make friends with it. Tell it that it’s a good bunny for coming close.
If it does jump away, you have to start again with food.
If you need to catch your bunny quickly, get it’s carry box, cover it with a blanket and leave the door open. Put food inside the box. When the bunny is in the box, shut the door.
Another way is to use a pen fence and corral the rabbit into a consecutively smaller area by condensing the fence’s size.
The whole idea of this is to get your bunny to trust you. It takes time. Patience. Food. Pats. If you do it wrong, your bunny will form opinions and disregard what you want in this situation. Defiance with a tail flick is a bunny-staple. You just have to start again and work on it.
Fireworks and other loud noises
If your bunny jumps at a loud noise, tell them they are OK, and everything is fine. Try to keep everything calm and on an even keel. They will learn really quickly to rely on your behaviour, and if you don’t react, they wont; but on the flip side, if you do, they will too.
You have to teach your bunny to not be scared of things. But when it comes to fireworks, they hear the high-pitched whistle and the bass bang on a different level to what we do. They hear more frequencies to us, and it can hurt their ears.
If it’s the first time your bunny will hear fireworks, it might be a good idea to wrap the bunny in a blanket burrito and cuddle it. Train it to remain calm when it hears strange noises. If you keep calm, it will too.
When it comes to thunder, because it’s a low rumble bass sound, bunnies can hear it really well. They can also hear it far in the distance and they can react to it, and you may not even know what they are telling you. Bunnies usually thump a lot when there’s thunder. They sit and look up at the sky (or ceiling) then run around and thump. You have to keep it calm, teach it to not be scared.
Bunnies copy your behaviour. If you are calm, they are calm, if you are frightened, they are too.
Happiness
Bunnies are very happy little things. They are fluff-balls of joy. It is important for you to work out what makes your bunny happy and allow it to feel those emotions regularly. Music and freedom are two things that make bunnies happy.
To show happiness, bunnies binky, which is a jump in the air and a twist. They even flick their ears when they run around.
Buttons, my rabbit, flicks his ears and wiggles his butt when he is happy. I can gauge his happiness level by whether he does that or not. He usually does the happy dance when he has been outside all day and I bring him in and he is happy his pen is clean, and his litter box is filled with fresh hay. Simple things make him happy.
Nova gets happy when she is outside and can run around in a large pen. We call her a race-rabbit. She will run really fast, looping in and out of the obstacles in the pen and she binkies several times in a row.
It is important to make sure your bunny feels joy each day, whether it’s simple like fresh hay, or giving them freedom to run. Bunnies who don’t get sunlight, freedom and time to be a bunny will get sad and bored, then they will start to destroy stuff.
Food
It may sound silly, but bunnies love eating. But if they eat foods they don’t like regularly, they will start to refuse to eat, and getting a bunny to start to like food again is tough. Find the foods that your bunny loves to eat and give them those foods.
They do get bored with eating the same things every day, just like you and me, so break their diet up a bit and give them different foods every second day. Alternating foods keeps it interesting.
If your bunny doesn’t stop eating, look at its diet and the quality of the food you are giving it. It may not be getting the right nutrition. Bunnies need lots of fibre (grass and hay), and a lot of different minerals and vitamins. If there is an imbalance in their diet, they will eat a lot to try to get enough of the things they need out of the food you’re giving them.
Unfortunately, lettuce, herbs and shop bought vegetables are not good for bunnies and even though lots of people give these “greens” to their pets, it is not nutritious enough for them. That’s why their bunnies don’t stop eating. Can you survive on lettuce and a few herbs? No? Neither can your rabbit. Rabbits need fresh grass and lots of hay.
For herbivore animals like rabbits, horses, cows, sheep etc, chewing has a major calming effect. They use it to de-stress. So a stressed bunny will want to chew and destroy things. Stress could be due to the lack of quality in food. It is important to feed your bunny a balanced diet with high quality foods.
It is OK to give your bunny mixed lettuce once in a while, but not for it’s normal diet every day. Buttons gets diarrhoea from mixed lettuce because there is no nutrition in it. He needs a more substantial meal, something that has a lot of fibre in it.
❝There’s a whole section on our diet. It’s all about what to feed us and the proper nutrition we need. There’s also an in depth look at the different grasses and hays, and even an article on how our digestion works.
Training your bunny
It is possible to train your bunny to do things on command. This is very good for simple things like “stop”, “stay”, “in your box”. You can get more advanced skills, but they take a longer time for the bunny to learn.
You must train your bunny, like you wouldn’t want a wild untrained pet dog; you don’t want a skittish, freakish, crazy rabbit. Most of the time you are training your bunny without even realising it. The simple things like feed times, cleaning times and free roam times are all part of the training process. More complex skills can be taught, but you have to spend a concerted effort on rewarding the correct behaviours.
❝Check out the life skills page, I’ve learned stacks from it! There’s easy, medium and hard skills that cover everything from staying still and coming on command through to sorting out coloured objects and following a set of directions.
Music, Family and Household Noises
Bunnies love music, they get used to any type of music. They remember the beat, notes and patterns, and if the song repeats often enough they are known to binky to it.
Bunnies get used to family noises like kids, or loud talkers, or even sudden fits of laughter. You just have to remember that the first few times it happens the bunny may need calming down.
Vacuum cleaners, washing machines, loud appliances are all ok. Bunnies get used to the noises.
Just remember that bunnies learn really quickly about what to be scared about and what not to be scared about. It’s up to you to teach it the difference right from day one.
❝We hear in a different range to hoomans, and some music with deep bass or high-pitched noises is painful for us. There’s a whole article written about how we hear.
Patience
You must be patient with your rabbit.
Make sure you take everything slowly, even move slowly and methodically. But do everything with purpose.
Bunnies take time to think about things. Don’t rush, don’t have fast movements. The faster you go, the less likely your bunny will understand, and they will start to not like the things you do.
Take time to teach them every tiny step in a process. Bunnies will automatically question everything. It’s your job to get them to understand that you aren’t as crazy as they think you are. Give them time to think about it.
If you want to do something with them, tell them first. Give them a few minutes to think about what you said, that way they can prepare themselves.
I always tell Buttons something minutes in advance before I do it. If I don’t, he gets upset with me, runs away and thumps his back feet, only because I didn’t follow the rules.
I ask my bunnies things like “Want to go outside in a minute?” Then I go away to set up the pen and come back to get them. During that time they get prepared and they are happy to go outside. They have time to think about it and make considerations and form opinions.
Give them a chance to think about it and they will surprise you.
❝I know we are stubborn and defiant. But we love our hoomans. We want to please them and be a good companion. Sometimes we just get confused, or we just don’t want to do what our hoomans want. That’s just us. If you want to learn about our different personalities, there’s a whole article about it.
Patting your bunny
Bunnies love love. They love being patted and touched. But if the bunny was hurt or has a negative emotion towards human contact (which may or may not be something you did) they won’t like being touched or picked up. You have to earn their trust again.
Some people ask “Why does my bunny bite me when I try to pick it up?”, put simply, it was hurt once and it remembers that. And when you reenact the event of picking it up, its brain shoots back to that memory and to protect itself it bites. You have to re-train it’s thinking which can take a long time if the event was traumatic. With time and patience, you can get a cuddly bunny. But never force it to do things it doesn’t want to do.
I know that with Buttons, he didn’t like being picked up or patted when he was young. Now that he is getting older he has decided that it is OK when he wants it. He gets into his pick me up pose, and waits to be picked up. If he isn’t, he gets upset and sits in a corner and mopes. I only realised that it was his pick me up pose when he did it over and over again when I asked him if he wanted to go outside. It took me a while to recognise it – he must have wanted to give me a treat for recognising it! Better late than never.
As for patting, he didn’t like it in the start, he could live happily without any human contact. But with a concerted effort from everyone in the household patting him the same way, he has decided that he can’t live without pats.
Bad behaviours
Just like when teaching a dog, you ignore bad behaviours and congratulate good behaviours. Sometimes it is hard to do because it’s easier to say “Get here! Bad dog!” rather than “Thank you for coming to me, good dog”. It’s just not in human nature to be positive towards bad behaviours. We immediately jump on the behaviour and growl. This is not a good training technique.
You simply cannot discipline rabbits, they don’t understand it. So if you’re wanting a perfect rabbit, you have to change your mindset and train with positive reinforcement and forget the bad behaviours.
If your bunny does something you don’t like, don’t growl at it. Just go up to your rabbit and pat it. It doesn’t know it did something bad, it doesn’t know how humans think. Patting it isn’t teaching it that what it did was good, it doesn’t care about that any more. Patting it reinforces your control of the rabbit. Pick the rabbit up and change the subject, take it for a walk around the house for 5 minutes, don’t put it in its pen. Once it is calm, you can put it back down and then tidy up the mess.
You have to spend time teaching it bad and good. Bunnies have no idea what human rules are.
If your bunny is being silly, for example, thumping and staring at you with evil-eyes, thump back at it by hitting your hand on the floor loudly and stare at the rabbit. That says to it that you are boss, it needs to listen and you are not putting up with its silly behaviour. Don’t thump often, but thump with emphasis.