Hello, my name is Guen Bradbury. I'm a Vet with special interest in rabbit behavior. I always think about rabbits needs in five major areas. So I think about the rabbits diet, the rabbit's environment. The rabbit's ability to behave normally as a rabbit should. A rabbit's need for companionship say to be with another rabbit and a rabbit's need for good health. The PDSA, which is an English charity looking at good animal welfare, have identified one in particular in rabbits. As being the main welfare problem of any companion animal species and in the country and that really is companionship. So if we look at a rabbit like this little rabbit here, the best thing he can possibly have is to have a little rabbit friend that he can spend all his time with because they are designed to be such social animals. So companionship really is one of the biggest. Frequently rabbits are kept in tiny little hutches as was the case in sort of, 100, 200 years ago. They just have almost no space. So they're in a little hutch where they have a grill on the front. They can see out, but they can't run around, they can't stretch out, they can reach up too and sniff the reef, which is a normal rabbit behavior to look at life at different levels. Well, if we think about what a rabbit in the world wants to do. He wants to walk around. He wants to eat grass from a level. When rabbits eat, they move from one place to the next to the next and they find that the tastiest leaves and the nicest flowers to eat. So by keeping them in a very small area we're delaying their ability to choose where they eat. In addition, they're prey spices so if we keep them right on top of their, their poo and their pee in the fact, it's very stressful, because normally in the wild they would do that in one place and then move quit a long way away so they don't alert foxes and other predators to where they're going to be. So keeping them in that tiny space where they can't exercise, but where we're forcing them to live on top of themselves is really bad. So if we look at a rabbit in the wild, they do eat almost all grass. We can't have that luxury of necessarily having grass all year round, but at least we can feed hay and we can feed grass. And those should be the major components of a diet. Unfortunately, again sort of from a hundred years ago, people started feeding rabbits grains and sort of crushed little bits of apple and pea, and those are just not normal feeds for rabbits. So when they do eat these, what we call muesli based mixes, we find that they get gut problems. They often get teeth problems. But they're also not designed to be eating such calorific things, so we see obesity as well. So what we recommend is that people feed almost all hay and grass, with perhaps a little. We talk about an egg cup full or a very, very small handful of concentrated food that all looks the same, so a pelleted food. Rather than a sort of muesli type mix. We can think about providing different foods as one area of making it more exciting for rabbits. So we can think about giving them dandelion leaves, sort of branches from fruit trees, like apple trees, so they can chew. But we can also think about making their environment more exciting. So, we can hide the food perhaps a little bit, put it in toys so they have to move around to find, we can make their hutch have different levels. So if we look at this cage here, you'll see that we've got a box that the rabbit can sit on top of, he can go inside, he can hide. He's got a lot more space, and by providing that box than he would if he just had a really boring, plain, open cage. If we look at this rabbit and we can see that it's much more relaxed now. So it's washing, a very normal rabbit behavior. A lot of the time that I've been talking, she's been looking at me with really quite bulgy eyes. A little bit of facial tension, cuz she's not quite sure what I'm up too. But she's not running away, she's sitting there, keeping an eye on the situation. So she's wary, but not terrified. Rabbits, although they perhaps haven't evolved to be the most intelligent animals, can quite easily be trained to do a lot of different behaviors. It really does a facilitate them to be a pet in the house. So they can be taught to come back to whistle, they can be taught to give a paw, to stand on their back legs and even sort of in a run out of a room or run in little circles. So they really are animals that have a lot more than the standard rabbit we also think about sitting on a hutch in the rain. The date have the sort of size of a dog that means you have to take in consideration there. They don't really make a lot of noise, so they can't tell us when their feeling upset, or stressed, or hungry. They're very easy just to forget about because they're quite. But what we have to think about is that they are actually very complex animal with a lot of needs. But they're also very interactive and you can have very good relationships with a rabbit as a pet. So when you see it as being a pet that is interesting, rather than a sort of decorative pet, that's when you'll start to make the step towards having a happy interactive rabbit as your pet. From a personal point of view I've had quite a few rabbits over the years, and I know that even if you have a neutered female so she can't have babies but you have a un-neutered male, you tend to see a lot of very sexual behavior. And the female can get very fed up and you get a lot of fighting. Whereas if you can neuter both your rabbits, you will have two calm rabbits that live comfortably together without the risk of babies or the health problems that we have from keeping a rabbits.
