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Find out what motivates them
Firstly, you have to understand bunnies behaviour, then you can modify your bunny’s behaviour by understanding what motivates them, and responding to the signals they give you. Spending time with your bunny builds a more solid relationship and you will learn their personality traits.
Training a rabbit is iterative, not linear. By repeating the process it won’t let your bunny feel frustrated and it won’t make you crazy.
You have to learn how rabbits learn, discover which techniques are the most effective and how to teach bunnies to do what you want.
Types of Learning
Rabbits have two ways of learning:
Non-associative Learning
The most simplest and fundamental form of learning that changes a behaviour towards a stimulus over time. Think about it like this, say your bunny doesn’t like being picked up, this form of learning teaches the bunny to minimise stressing when picked up. It doesn’t replace one thing for another, for example you give your bunny a treat each time you pick it up, so it waits for to be picked up to get the treat.
This type of learning makes nearly-permanent changes to a stimulus. It happens when a bunny is given that stimulus repeatedly, and that stimulus is not linked to anything else, like food or treats. There are two forms of non-associative learning:
- Habituation is when a bunny is no longer affected by a stimulus.
- Sensitisation is when a bunny becomes more sensitive to a stimulus.
Example
An example of habituation is that some people think that their bunny will get used to being picked up if they do it frequently. However, the rabbit becomes more anxious about being picked up and will become harder to catch, which is sensitisation.
Associative Learning
Is event-behaviour conditioning, where the bunny learns that there is a link between an event and a behaviour.
Classical conditioning – when a rabbit can predict an event, for example it knows it will get a treat. It’s when the rabbit learns to associate a neutral behaviour and a stimulus that it is motivated by. That way the rabbit has a natural response when the stimulus occurs.
Neutral Behaviours – Neutral behaviours are those that the rabbit does naturally and doesn’t really need to concentrate on. For example, the rabbit knows that a rattle of a food container means it will get food and it gets excited in preparation for the food delivery.
Operant conditioning – is when a bunny learns to modify its behaviour based on the outcome of that behaviour, and it learns to predict when to modify its behaviour to achieve different consequences. For example, The rabbit who is excited in preparation for food delivery and meets the owner at its food bowl every time they hear the rattle of the container.
Understanding Rabbit Learning
Each rabbit is different, and they like doing different things. To train a rabbit to do things it doesn’t like will take longer and with much more patience. You have to give the rabbit something that it wants so that it can modify its behaviour.
People usually train bunnies with food, because it reinforces positive feelings. Rabbit’s behaviour can also be reinforced by giving them access to grass, a large play space or social interaction.
Rabbits don’t like being lifted, turned upside down, being restrained, or being frustrated, or separated from a companion. These are punishments, unless the bunny has been trained to disregard the unpleasant sensations.
Humans feel that their presence or interactions reinforce behaviours, which can be the case. But with timid bunnies it can be seen as a punishment and the bunny will withdraw.
If a rabbit trusts its owner and takes food out of their hand, a bunny will be easier to train. First, you have to gain the trust of the bunny before you can even consider training it. Thn you can use hand feeding as a reward.
If the bunny doesn’t take food from your hand and fear is the motivator, escape will be a stronger behaviour. In this situation, constructional approach training is used to help the rabbit relax. Then, once it accepts food from the hand, training can commence.
Positive Reinforcement
Rabbits don’t understand punishment because it isn’t specific. It’s simply just a waste of time. Instead, change your behaviour to reinforce the positive behaviours your bunny does. That way, it will slowly stop doing the behaviours you don’t like and do the behaviours you do like.
Positive reinforcement decreases stress, speeds up learning and increases the bond you have with your bunny. Perfect positive reinforcement must be perfectly timed with the desired behaviour, and needs to be reinforcing enough that the bunny wants to perform the behaviour again to receive the reward.
It usually involves food rewards, which should not cause health problems when consumed in large quantities, because training should occur each day. Each reward should be no larger than a pea and be something the bunny looks forward to eating, which are called jackpot rewards. Food used for training should be different to the rabbit’s usual daily diet.
Never starve your rabbit to get better training results.
Increase the value of food rewards
The less predictable the food reward, the more motivation the bunny has to achieve it.
Predictable awards allow the animal to think about whether or not the activity is worth getting the reward, and can reject the award if it does not outweigh the cost. Unpredictable rewards prevent this decision-making process.
When the rabbit is learning a new behaviour, the owner should reinforce the desired behaviour every time with food; this ensures that the behaviour is consistent.
When the behaviour becomes relatively consistent, reward the bunny every second or third time it completes the behaviour, then after a while reward it randomly. Then the bunny can’t afford to not do the behaviour because it is unknown when the reward will come. Then when the reward does come, it has more value each time.
Make the reward different, often, so the bunny can’t predict what it will get. If you keep using the same treat each time, the bunny will weigh up the costs of the behaviour against the benefit it will get. If you mix the rewards up, then it will maintain its desire to learn.
Once you reduce how often you treat the bunny for the behaviour, it’s important to sometimes give a jackpot reward, which is a bigger and better reward to motivate them again.
Constructional Approach Training
Constructional approach training (CAT) is a type of training is best used if the rabbit is fearful of their owner. When the animal is very stressed, they want to escape and they won’t want to be trained with food. The biggest motivator is to get away from the owner, and this can be used as the reward.
In this instance the CAT is the owner.
According to Behavioural Problems in Rabbits by Guin Bradbury “[w]hen the owner approaches, the rabbit becomes more stressed. The owner does not perceive, or react to, the behavioural expression of this stress, and continues to approach. The rabbit is in ‘fight-or-flight’ mode, so either shows defensive agonistic behaviour (makes the owner withdraw), or runs away from the owner (the rabbit withdraws): both of these behaviours increase the distance between the owner and the rabbit, which reinforces the behaviour… rather than the rabbit achieving the reward through either a ‘fight’ response or a ‘flight’ response, the owner withdraws when the rabbit remains calm.”
It’s really important that owners see and understand the early signs of stress in rabbits. Once identified, we can start to change the way we behave around our rabbit according to what they are telling us. The trigger, in this case the approach of the owner, must be below the ‘fight’ or ‘flight’ response threshold.
The CAT technique has the following steps:
- setting a baseline for approach – find the distance between yourself and the rabbit, where the rabbit is not stressing, running away or attacking.
- approach – move your hand towards the imaginary line where your rabbit starts to tense up. Wait for the rabbit to calm down (shift in body position, ears move). As soon as this happens, move your hand away. Wait 10-15 seconds and repeat. The rabbit should calm down faster each time. This is desensitising it to the approach, learning the reinforcement pattern. Always move hand away when rabbit shows calm behaviour. After a while or repeating this, you can move your hand closer. But make sure it doesn’t cross the imaginary line where the bunny moves away, or you’ll have to start again.
- switchover – the bunny should be starting to show calmer behaviours, quicker and more frequently. You should be able to get quite close to the rabbit. The behaviour has been reinforced, but the bunny is still scared.
- interaction – Once the bunny’s fear turns to curiosity, the bunny will try to interact with the trigger (i.e your hand). This shows that the constructional approach training has been successful. If the bunny shows fear or anxiety, go back a step. When the rabbit wants to interact, its motivations have changed, and distance is not reinforcing, but interaction is. This means if you withdraw when the rabbit wants to interact, you are removing the reinforcer – and that is a punishment. Initially, when the rabbit wants to interact with your hand, don’t try to touch the rabbit. Once it becomes more confident, offer food from your had, which positively reinforces it’s behaviour.
- generalisation – once a behaviour is learned, it is specific to the environment in which it has been learned. The final stage of this training ensures that the rabbit can generalise and apply this knowledge in different situations. Follow the same steps in different places, the process should be quicker if it has already learned the behaviour. If it is calm in all environments, the training was successful.
Clicker Training
Clicker trining is a very popular way to train animals. It is where you use a device that creates a loud click noise when you press the button. It is used to reinforce positive behaviour and mark the desired behaviour with a “click”. When the animal performs the desired behaviour and you click the device, you reward the animal with food. This makes the click become a conditioned reinforcer even though it has no real value, it is associated with the food reward.
Clicker training is not the only way to train animals, there are plenty of different ways. But the most simplistic ways are often the best.
You don’t even have to spend money on an official bunny clicker. It can be as simple as jam jar lid with the freshness bubble in the centre, or you can click with your tongue. The clicker can’t be too loud, like one you’d use with a dog or horse, because it can scare the bunny.
Clicker training has three steps:
- association of the click with a treat
- association of the desired behaviour with the treat
- doing the desired behaviour on cue
When training a bunny, you have to start slow, and do it for 10-15 minutes a day for a while, then move to a couple of times a day. Once the bunny can do the trick easily, then knock it back to once a day so you have time to teach and practice more tricks.
Remember that if you feed your bunny each time it performs correctly, the bunny will get full. They have a little tummy. It is important to break training up so they have digestion time.
Once the bunny learns that the click means food, it has been classically conditioned.
The second stage is to get the bunny to learn that it can make the click occur by performing the desired behaviour. This can be done two ways:
- click and reward good behaviour
- click an existing behaviour that is performed frequently
The easiest to teach is when the bunny comes to you. That way it knows it gets a click and food when it does that behaviour. Once hte bunny comes to you for the reward, move to another place and try it again. Training may be faster this time.
Make sure you click before giving food. The click should be done the instant the behaviour has been completed. It’s ok if you click at the wrong time in the start, because you are learning too.
You will have to reinforce the behaviour while the rabbit is learning the behaviour, and this can take a while. The rabbit must experience a eureka! moment where it associates the behaviour with the reward, after that it will become more frequent and specific.
It’s at this stage that you don’t want to click at the wrong time, because the bunny will get confused.
Once the bunny has learned one behaviour through clicker training, any others will be learned quickly.
Different Ways to Learn
Bunnies can learn behaviours in different ways, and not all bunnies learn the same. It’s important that you spend time with your bunny and learn how it learns. Below is a list of ways that your bunny may learn by:
- Luring – hold the food in front of the rabbit, then move a little until the rabbit is in the correct position. When it is in the correct position, click and then reward.
- Capturing – is clicking and rewarding a behaviour that is a natural rabbit behaviour, like standing on back legs.
- Shaping – is rewarding incremental steps to the desired behaviour.
- Targeting – teach the rabbit to touch a target with its nose, all subsequent behaviours are performed by moving the target so the rabbit has the correct movement or position.
Getting the bunny to perform on cue when the signal is given takes practice. Rabbits communicate visually and find hand signals easier to learn than vocal commands. Visual cues need ot be specific for the rabbit to be able to see the difference (because of their grainy eye sight). Tactile cues can be learned but are sometimes not very useful.
Once the rabbit can perform the trick with a click and reward, you can then start training on cue. By that time, the bunny has probably learned more visual cues that you can imagine, like you kneeling on the floor, leaning towards them, holding out a hand in a particular way. It then gets prepared for the behaviour.
If you are going to offer a vocal cue, use the vocal cue first before any hand signal, that will train the bunny to predict the vocal cue before the visual cue.
If you are teaching your bunny to come to you when given a specific cue, don’t pick the bunny up when it comes. The reward for the behaviour is the click and food. This behaviour will get harder to train if you do pick the bunny up because it wont approach you as frequently. Once the bunny comes to you, start moving away so it learns to follow you.
Don’t train bunnies if they are stressed or agitated.
If your bunny doesn’t seem like it is learning, check:
- timing – are you timing the click correctly? If it’s too soon or too late it will associate the wrong behaviour.
- criteria – decide on that the success looks like, and work towards that. Hold the success picture in your mind and work towards that goal. Don’t set unachievable criteria to get to success. Take each step slowly.
- rate of reinforcement – the rabbit needs to learn how to learn before any for of success can be achieved. If you click too frequently, or not enough, the rabbit will lose interest. Always finish the session with a positive behaviour, because bunnies remember the last thing they did.
- quality of reinforcement – when training a new or difficult behaviour you need to have higher motivation to learn it. Have better treats available. Standard treats are good for simple behaviours, but quality treats are for jackpot rewards.
If your bunny isn’t interested, provide more treats. But not so many the bunny gets full before you start training. The bunny will be mostly interested in it’s environment, and not you. To change that, give treats, so you become the best thing in the environment.
Not all tricks can be taught through clicker training. So think about whether its important to click for everything the bunny does.
If you want to chain behaviours together to make a large trick, teach each step separately, then once the bunny knows each one, slowly join them together into a chain.
You can stop using the clicker once the bunny learns the food is more important than the click. Intermittent clicking will reinforce the behaviour.