my pet rabbit is being fresh & mean

Question
Hi Kiersten,
I have a 6 month old rabbit she has a funny & great personality, she's fun she loves when I play with her, loves attention of course. The past 2 days she has been fresh, trying to chew & scratch every thing in site, trying to tip over her out of cage litter box, biting at her cage when she is in her cage and she has almost everything a bunny could want to chew on even big wood pieces, when I walk up to tell her no she lunges at me in a mean way not like whe she's playing, I was hoping you could help me understand. My fiance feels maybe she is in heat because she has never acted like this since we've had her.

Look forward to hearing from you soon,

Regards,
Lisa

Answer
HI Lisa,

I don't know if anyone answered this for you yet so I will.

Your female rabbit has hit sexual maturity.  Your fiance was on the right track.  Her behavior is classic female hormonally-induced behavior.  The difference is that this is not just for a period of time, but if left this way, this is how she will act the rest of her life.

There is only one way to get your 'sweet' gal back.  You need to get her spayed by a good rabbit vet.  Her cage aggression will go back down.  The defensiveness will go down.  If she has started marking more outside her litterbox, this will decrease.  Most important, she will have a chance to live a normal lifespan of 10-12 years rather than about 5-6 (dying prematurely from uterine cancer).  Most female rabbits (over 80%) that aren't fixed will die early from it.

Being 6 months old she should be in excellent health to handle the surgery.  If you don't have a good rabbit vet (not all vets are) go to:

www.rabbit.org/vets/vets.html

and find a House Rabbit Society recommended vet in your area.  If you can't find any, call up local and state rabbit rescues around you and ask who they would go to with a sick or injured rabbit.

You need to have a vet that will give you both post-op antibiotics (like baytril) while she's healing, and also several days worth of pain medicine (ie metacam) so that she will still want to move and eat the first few days.  If she doesn't eat because it's too painful to move, her gut can shut down and she could go into gi stasis and die.

So if the vet doesn't understand how important pain management is to post-op rabbits and won't prescribe any, go to a different vet.

Write back anytime.

Lee