How to know when the dominance hierarchy has been established?

I’ve been bonding my male and female rabbits (both spayed/neutered) for around 3-4 months now and I’m nearing the end of the process. For the most part it has been going great; the reason it has taken so long is because my females is very territorial and dominant and so took a while to accept the male (which she seems to have done now for the most part). Also should probably note I am bonding two house rabbits to be free roam (the male is moving into the female’s living space). The only problem we have now is that I’m not sure dominance has been fully established. It is very clear to us that the female is dominant and male subservient, but I’m not sure they’ve fully worked that out yet. The female is still trying to mount the male (not excessively but enough to show that their hierarchy hasn’t been worked out fully yet). But the male often runs away from the female when being mounted meaning the female often ends up chasing him (not aggressively though as I have seen the difference compared to when we originally started bonding and she chased in a more aggressive manner - we have moved on from that). But either way, I think the female feels as though the male isn’t quite understanding that she is the dominant one in the relationship and so feels the need to keep establishing it. Also it doesn’t help that the male will not groom the female, which i know is an important sign of subservience to the female’s dominance. I am almost sure this is because the male is a rescue and lacks some of the typical bunny etiquette and interactions that most rabbits show (he was brought up around a dog and we think he was separated from his mother at an early age and so didn’t learn these important interactions). So the failure to groom the female along with the fact he isn’t too happy about being mounted is meaning that the female is left somewhat unfulfilled with the lack of a clear dominance hierarchy as the male is showing mixed signals.

Does anyone have ideas on how I should handle this? Go back to a neutral territory and let them play it out there, or continue in our current setting and with time they will work it out?

Sorry for the long message and thanks for reading if you got this far!

In my experience the dominant bunny grooms the other one. I have just bonded a male and a female. He chased her, she ran away submissively, but a week on I caught him grooming her, and I have noticed this time and again. Your female may always want to be the dominant one especially ifshe feels the territory is hers.

That’s really interesting, as all of the things I have read/been told have said that the dominant bunny is the one who demands to be groomed for the most part, but it’s good to know it can work both ways. Thanks for your help!

The dominant bunny usually grooms the other bunny, but sometimes it doesn’t always happen. There were a massive group of lovely Californian bunnies that came into ARC rescue. Quite a few got adopted by members of this forum. Some of the girls were quite unusual in that they didn’t groom their male partner. It does happen

Every bonded pair is different