Rabbit still humping after neutering

Question
I have 2 dwarf rabbits, a male and a female. The female will be a year old in December, and the male is about 6 months old. We had the male neutered at the end of August, and the female neutered at the beginning of October. We have both in separate cages in different parts of the house, but we want to bond them.

We tried and introductory meeting two weeks after the female had been spayed, and found that the male was still humping her (she wasn't displaying any aggression towards him though, she actually paid no attention to him). We waited another week and tried again with the same result. Its been over a month for both surgeries (almost a month and a half for the male) and we tried again today. The male still humps her and grabs hold of her hair and pulls it out while he is humping. He is also still having a problem with potty-training.

My question is, is it still too early after the surgery for his behavior to have improved? We really want them to be able to get along, and we think she will be accepting of him.

Answer
Dear Jessica,

Humping is a normal part of rabbit behavior when a pair is establishing social dominance, and even same-sex pairs will do this.  It's more uncommon that rabbits *don't* mount upon first introductions.

The good news is that she doesn't seem to care.  What you'll need to do now is increase the frequency of their contact to at least a couple of times a day, and let the humping play out, unless the female starts to show aggression about it.  At that point, separate them, give them strokes and cuddles, and give them a "time out."

Gradually, the male will stop humping her, as the novelty wears off.  

As far as the litterbox habits are concerned, he could be marking simply because he can see and smell but not touch his lady love.  Once they are together, his habits will likely improve, though a few rabbits are just messy by nature and are not as tidy as we might wish.  For tips on litterbox training, please see:

www.bio.miami.edu/hare/training.html

And for good articles on bonding bunnies, please see:

http://search.atomz.com/search/?sp-a=00062824-sp00000000&sp-q=bonding&user=enter...

I hope this helps.

Dana