How To Hold A Rabbit

Hi. My name's Marie, and I'm the deputy manager of the small animal department at Wood Green Animal Shelters, and today I'm going to tell you how to pick up a rabbit. So, when you need to handle your rabbit, it's really important the rabbit feels comfortable and safe with you.

Never chase your rabbit and intentionally try to grab it out of the hutch. It's going to be a really scary and daunting thing for it. It's important to remember that the rabbit is a prey species, and they find you quite scary, and being lifted off the ground is not a natural thing for them, so they are likely to kick/scratch.

So the best way to interact with your rabbit is to have them sitting with you, and let them come up to you. They're going to feel far more confident if they have the choice to come up to you and hop away again. When you're preparing to go to handle a rabbit, always make sure they're aware of what you're going to do.

So talk to them gently, but a most importantly, never put your hands right towards the front of their face. This part here is a little bit of a blind spot, because their eyes are on the side of the head, and putting your hand in front of the face is really scary when they all of a sudden focus onto it. By doing this, you're really likely to get a bite or a scratch, or even a bit of a growl out of them.

So give them a little gentle stroke, and just stroke them on the shoulder blades, so they're aware you're about to do this, and it just helps them feel comfortable and relaxed. So I'm going to just demonstrate this, the handing, on the male up here. So I want to go towards him, stroke him on his back, and just stroke into his ears, and that just helps him feel really calm and relaxed.

What I then do is bring this hand around, support him under the middle and support his bottom, and lift him straight up. And that's really relaxed for him, and he's supported. Bring him straight to you, straight away, and keep a nice firm comfortable hand underneath and around his side.

Never ever pick them up by their ears, and by the scruff, and make sure they're always supported comfortable for you. Turning them over into a bit of a relaxed or hypnotic state is really not an emotional feeling for a rabbit, and it's actually very stressful for them. It in some ways, it is always what they would do in a kind of a fight defense against a predator.

Make sure your rabbit's nice and calm, and always put them back down on the ground when they're in a calm way, and that will make them feel that it is a comfortable position that they're being in. If they're handled to a large extent, and then they're kicking and scratching and then you're putting them down, they're just going to believe that that's all they've got to do and you're most likely going to get kicked and scratched on a regular basis. So put them back down onto your lap, and just lift them down onto the ground and let them hop away.

Even have some food ready to just hand them out, so they can feel nice and calm about it. When you're trying to socialize your rabbits, make sure you can sit in their accommodation every day for at least an hour. Let them hop up to you and even when you're providing them with their fresh food each day, use that as an opportunity to be able to handle them.

So sit in the run with them, have the food on your lap and let the rabbits come up to you. That way they're really going to associate you with something good and something positive. .