What’s the key to helping your pet rabbit live a long, healthy, and happy life?
It’s simple: spay or neuter.
Raging hormones can cause unaltered rabbits to display a number of less-than-desirable habits, including aggressive lunging and biting, territorial nipping, growling, destructive chewing and digging, spraying urine, and loss of good litter box habits.
Rabbits are often thought of as a toy-like, low maintenance pet, and many new bunny owners don’t realize that their charges require medical care similar to dogs and cats. At the top of that list is sterilization, which can help the bunny stay healthy and eliminate many behavioral problems.
“The vast majority of people who buy rabbits at a pet store are completely unaware that they must be spayed or neutered to prevent unwanted behaviors, and cancers in females. This is why we have such a rescue problem: when the [rabbits] reach maturity and start displaying natural behavior, people just dump them,” said Dana Krempels, Ph.D., who rescues rabbits and founded the Miami, Fla., chapter of the House Rabbit Society. Pet stores don’t routinely spay or neuter the rabbits they sell.
Rabbits generally reach sexual maturity between the ages of three and eight months. Raging hormones can then cause unaltered rabbits to start displaying a number of less-than-desirable habits, including aggressive lunging and biting, territorial nipping, growling, destructive chewing and digging, spraying urine, and loss of good litter box habits, according to Dr. Krempels. Unaltered rabbits may also smell more because of their hormones.
Rabbits are social creatures, and enjoy the company of other bunnies. Same-sex pairs can cohabitate quite nicely, but if they’re not sterilized, they may start fighting with each other once they reach sexual maturity.
As for mixed-sex pairs… well, if they’re not “fixed,” they’ll do what bunnies do best: reproduce. According to Dr. Krempels, a pair of their rabbits and their offspring can produce 2,000 babies in the course of a year. “You may think you can find homes for your bunny’s babies, but we have seen far too many abandoned and dumped pets to think that this is a realistic hope,” she explained. “And for every one produced by a casual breeder, another is put to death at an animal shelter, because there are simply not enough homes for all of them. “Many casual breeders will sell their baby bunnies to pet stores, said Dr. Krempels, where they have a good chance of ending up with irresponsible owners, or worse-many rabbits are sold as snake food.
Those who keep rabbits outside in individual hutches may think they don’t need to get the animals sterilized—after all, any bothersome behavioral habits won’t be noticeable if they’re not in the house, and if they’re separated, they can’t reproduce. That’s true, but unaltered rabbits, especially females, are at great health risk, according to Keith Gold, DVM, who sees many rabbits at the Falls Road Animal Hospital in Baltimore, Md. Uterine cancer is “extremely common” in unspayed females, Dr. Gold said. Such rabbits are also at a higher risk for mammary cancer, he added.
“One study found that unspayed female rabbits have greater than an 80 % chance of developing uterine and/or ovarian cancer by the age of three years,” said Dr. Krempels. “As the bunny ages, this risk continues to increase. By leaving your female rabbit intact, you increase her risk of cancer every day: the longer she has her uterus and ovaries, the greater the chance that they will become cancerous.”
There’s really no good reason not to spay or neuter a bunny, she said. Common misconceptions are that the procedure will change a rabbit’s personality, or make it “fat and lazy.” Your rabbit’s endearing qualities will not change. His or her unacceptable, hormonally induced behaviors usually will,” explained Dr. Krempels.
And despite rabbits’ notorious fragility, the spay or neuter surgery is usually very safe in the hands of an experienced rabbit veterinarian. “It’s a very successful procedure,” Dr. Gold said, estimating that the success rate is in the upper 99th percentile. Although it’s a concern anytime an animal is put under anesthesia, he said, complications with rabbits are rare. But it’s important to make sure your veterinarian is rabbit-savvy, Dr. Gold said. “[The operation is] different than with dogs and cats,” he said. Rabbits are anatomically different, and their organs are more sensitive. The procedure is also different, Dr. Gold said. But rabbits of any age should be able to handle the operation relatively easily, he said. His clinic performs numerous spays on rescue bunnies of unknown age.
“No surgery is ever 100 percent risk-free,” Dr. Krempels said. “However, with modern anesthetics and with an experienced veterinarian, rabbits can be spayed or neutered with no greater risk than that experienced by a dog or cat being spayed. We suggest that older rabbits—four and older—have a complete blood chemistry and panel done to check for metabolic abnormalities that might increase surgical risk. But our vets have routinely spayed rabbits as old as seven or eight years, and neutered males as old as 10 years without problems. “One study found that unspayed female rabbits have greater than an 80 percent chance of developing uterine and/or ovarian cancer by the age of three years,” said Dr. Krempels.
Rabbit owners used to be largely uninformed about the importance of spaying and neutering, but that’s changed in recent years, Dr. Gold said. However, informed clients are also the ones most likely to bring their rabbits to a vet in the first place, he added. “The word is out there that this really should be done,” he said, a change he has attributed, in part, to the many informative rabbit-oriented sites on the Internet.
