Newbie needing some advice

[JINJAPIG]

hi 1st time on this forum and after reading thru some of the care sections i need a little advice.

I'll start at the beginning..............

i wanted to get my daughter a rabbit (i obviously didn't think the 7 guinea pigs, 3 staffies, a hamster and a snail were enough!) so i looked thru some local advertising websites and some bunnies free to good home. called lady and she actually had 4 she wanted to re home but didn't want to slit the brothers up as they had been together since birth and now 11 months old. dwarf lop crosses i thought cant be too big i had a large 2 storey hutch so no problem. well when i got there i was greeted by 4 of the biggest bunnies i have ever seen!!! turned out they were crossed with a giant continental!! no wanting to let her down by not taking them or upsetting my daughter by not arriving home with them i took then home with me.

they are lovely well natured boys. one tends to be more feisty than the others, a dominance thing i presume. there are signs of previous fallings out i have found a healing scab here and there and one has a bit of ear missing!!

they are not neutered and after reading a few threads this worried me, about fighting and dominance

aware of the fact i either need a bigger hutch or need to get another and split them up, i have been putting them out in the run daily for exercise.

my ideal would be to have a bigger hutch and keep them together as i promised the previous owner, would this be possible if all neutered. or am i needing to look on a bigger scale, like a hutch for each, get neutered then find female companions???

any advice is greatly received

 

[blue_vix]

would have thought shed with attached run... having never really seen a rabbit bigger than a mini/ dwaft lop cross not sure I have much concept of their size but a shed would prob work out cheaper than several hutches

 

[JINJAPIG]

i got that idea too from reading some other posts too. have perfect place in garden for it )

any advice on keeping The Boys together un neutered/neutered? :?

 

[fluffiebunnie]

The boys will have to be neutered if they are to remain together. Get them done together so they are not split up and then they can recover together.

 

[rngpwelfare]

Yep I'd book them into the vets as a group and as quickly as poss. If they start falling out then you'll have to split so get them down as quick as you can.

I have a litter of 5 males all living together, they all went for their operations together and haven't been a problem. In fact I kept them amongst other reasons because I love watching them interact and display natural behaviors with each other.

By the sound of things you could do with a large shed or at least a shed with different levels for them all to live in together.

Well done on rescuing them

 

[tintin]

I haven't read of anyone on here with a large group of uneutered males. There have been a few mentions of people with a pair of unneutered males, but generally I think it's accepted that unneutered males are quite hard to bond together and can really injure each other when they start fighting. This is most likely to happen as they reach maturity at around 3/4 months, so you need to keep an eye on them and get them snipped asap I would say. We had to split up then rebond ours as they got pretty vicious before the op.

Well done for rescuing them. Were they ones she bred and couldn't sell or an accidental litter? Are you sure they are all male? We thought we had 2 girls - turns out both were boys.

I think a shed and run set-up would be great. I wish we had got a shed instead of buying a double tier hutch. Not much more money, but so much more secure and more space for them.