Trying to bond, gave up after five minutes! What to do next?

Hello all,

I just tried to start the bonding process with my 2 rabbits - a speyed female minilop and neutered male nethie. I put them both in a small pen in a neutral area with some water and hay. Initially she humped him then he quickly wriggled out and started humping her...and wouldn't stop. I put some food in to try to distract them but he only stopped to eat a couple of pellets then carried on. After a couple of minutes of him humping and her calmly eating, he moved around the side of her to an angle that prevented her eating, which annoyed her, and they started rolling around with fur flying at which point I separated them.

They're now in separate adjacent pens, she's calmly eating and he's thumping, digging and chewing the bars.

What would you do next? I'm not giving up after 5 minutes, but I'm concerned he's going to get hurt when I put them back together (she's twice his size).

Any advice gratefully appreciated!

I'm just in the middle of bonding two bunnies as well. I think you need to start slowly. Mine were living alongside each other for 2 weeks and during the second week, they had 'speed dates' of about 10 minutes to half an hour at a time, depending on how the date was going. Some bunnies will immediately get on but others need some 'getting to know you' time. I'd just take a step back and let them get to know each other's scent etc for a couple of weeks. You can swap their food dishes and litter trays as well whilst they're living next door to each other. I set up a dog crate and some puppy panels so that they were only separated by a wire panel and could see, sniff and touch each other without coming to any harm.

Good luck and let us know how it's going.

When that happens, I tend to try and spot in advance when one of them has reached the point of severe annoyance, and lift the offending bun off and gently place them next to the other one. In my view, the aim is to not let it get to the stage of fighting and fur flying, but to try and bat it off at the pass by predicting when it's likely to happen and gently intervening by holding bun aside, taking humping bun off etc, but not by separating completely. It can be extremely tiring because with persistent buns it needs a lot of supervising in the first hours in particular.

To some extent I think it's personal preference, and to some extent it's led by what works for individual bunnies, but my preference is to go for the stop-them-as-much-as-needed-but-don't-separate-them technique unless there is good reason to try a different approach.

How long have they both been neutered?

Thanks, we managed to get 10 minutes of relatively peaceful interaction by intervening and calming him down when he looked likely to jump on her, then put them in adjacent pens overnight for him to calm down and get used to her presence. She is completely chilled about the whole thing and kept pushing her head under his for grooming, then grooming him when he ignored her. It looks like he needs some time to get used to the idea of another rabbit, he's pretty stressy in general and was displaying a lot of his fear behaviour yesterday, he looks calmer this morning.

She was speyed a month ago and him a year, so I was expecting any hormonal behaviour from her not him...I think the poor little guy is just one of life's worriers and all that change in one go was too much for him. He reacts to everything new as if it's a threat, hopefully he'll learn she isn't.

I had them living separately again for a few weeks as he needed quite a few vets trips, but having re-introduced them on Thursday they are now living together in a puppy pen in a neutral room and doing OK. How long would you leave it before attempting to move them to a neutralised hutch outside? I'm a bit concerned about how to neutralise the run as it's not moveable; do you have to spray white vinegar on the grass??

Best to keep them in the pen for a couple of weeks, making it slightly bigger after 1 week. If all has been successful then I would think you can put them in their hutch (neutralised). After a few days try them in the run, just spray some vinegar around and it should be OK. Best of luck. Keep us informed!