Cotton and Buttons’ Family
The lady who sold me the bunnies said she only had two left, which were Cotton and Buttons. That meant I didn’t get a choice, but I didn’t mind.
She said that Cotton and Buttons were a mixed breed, they had dwarf and lop in them. The lady said that their grandfather was a mini lop and their father was a dwarf, and that the bunnies will grow to about 4kg.
I hope Cotton and Buttons’ siblings found good homes and are living their best bunny lives.
The First Learning Curve
I had done extensive research online and on social media prior to getting Cotton and Buttons. I had found out that if I held them in the start, they could go into shock (eyes huge and nose twitching very fast) but not move their bodies. That’s because they think I was going to eat them. If I continue holding them they could die of a heart attack.
Update – August, 2023
I now know this to NOT be true.
Give your bunnies time to settle in, then do what you want with them, pat them, love them, snuggle them. The more your handle them, the less scared they will get. You have to do it with confidence. Don’t be nervous, because your bunny will pick that up and react to it accordingly. You have to handle them a lot right from the start, because if you don’t you’ll get behavioural issues – which I now have with Buttons.
Buttons didn’t like human contact when he was young. He had to be exposed to it a lot to learn to like it, which he did overnight, at about 11 months old. He was suddenly a completely different rabbit.
Don’t overdo it, you have to pace it out, so the rabbit learns that they can trust you before anything. It’s your job to teach your rabbit to not be stressed. You have to expose it to lots of different situations. If I had known this back then, I could have snipped Buttons’ behaviours in the bud right away, but I didn’t know what I was doing, and I had a lot to learn. The one thing I would change now, looking back at this, is that I needed to realise that they were now my bunnies and I didn’t have to follow anyone else’s opinions, I could do what I wanted – if I wanted to pick them up and cuddle them, I could.
Just be mindful of the huge changes they will be going through, but they are pretty tough and can cope quite well with change when given time to explore. Give them the space they need, and they will be fine. I have written an article about all the things I should have known before getting bunnies, in the Health Library.
These are not the usual things, they are more the things that will make your life easier in the long term. I learned them the hard way, so you don’t have to. There were also a stack of things about behaviours that I didn’t know. I’ve made a list of behaviours you want to promote in your bunny right from the start, also in the Health Library.