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Lahi had a warty-looking bump grow on the base of his ear. Small and bumpy, about the size of a grain of rice. It was black, with the rest of his skin white. He had it for many many years with no change, until this year it suddenly tripled in size and got very angry. It was identified by testing...

Yep, about what I figured. Horses lock their legs and sleep standing up, so eyes open is certainly not a stretch.

To my immense regret I’ve yet to be able to figure out how to rotate the video while it’s still on my phone. Uploading it to YouTube from my phone also didn’t give the option to rotate it. I’ll do it eventually with some video editing software when I put it on my computer, but for now, get a...

Recently I struck up a new friendship with a woman who fosters various rescue rabbits, and as we were furiously swapping cute bunny pictures, it came up that Lahi sleeps with his eyes open, to which she expressed shock. She’d never seen a rabbit do this! And then I was shocked right back...

Wow, thanks for the comprehensive answer! Definitely something to be wary of. I think for lack of anything better to use I’m going to use it sparingly and watch very carefully for adverse reactions—tea tree oil is pretty far down the ingredients list so my guess is that the amount is minimal...

After Lahi’s surgery I decided I’d like to get some kind of salve/cream to put on his incision to keep it soft as it scars. It would suck for his ear to become all stiff, it’s kinda amazing as it is that he retains full muscle control of his ear after having the base cut open the way it was...

On the diatomaceous earth note: it works on all and any carapace insects. They just have to get covered in it, and they shrivel up and die. I bought some to deal with a cockroach problem, and then also used it on my plants to treat spider mites. It’s also a nutritional supplement, and completely...

I got some sonotubes initially to protect the inner holes in the cabinet condo I was building and I was displeased to find that the inside of the tube seemed to have a waxy coating to it. Delilah immediately started ripping the cardboard to shreds and eating the pieces, so that made me pretty...

Yep! Delilah’s probably a little quirkier than most because she had no rabbit interaction for most of her first year and was instead raised by dogs. It took Picca and Lahi a very long time to teach her how to be a proper rabbit, and even today she will sometimes forget to hop and start walking...

The enclosure wall was a solid sheet of flat wood. Plywood, I think it’s called. This is what it looked like from the outside: 4’ wide by 8’ long and I thought it was 5’ high but now I’m thinking it was probably 4’ or a bit more than that. The 4’ side swung in on a large piano hinge. I...

Lahi is home and doing well. Let him out of the carrier to hop into the litter box on his own and the first thing he did was stuff some hay in his face, followed by quite an extended period of eating cecotrophs, then running up the ramp to eat a few bites of food and then fell straight asleep...

I know, I saw something similar but there’s no other way she could have gotten out of that enclosure. I was coming down in the morning and finding the room completely trashed, poop everywhere, once I moved the cage away from the wall it stopped. However I might have overestimated the height of...

So Lahi had his surgery around noon today. A couple hours later they called me with the update: the surgery had gone well and he was just getting settled into an incubator for warmth while he woke up. The bad news: they were unable to take the 1cm margins they wanted to, because there was a...

Dropping Lahi off for surgery tomorrow at 8am, super nervous for him. The fact that they told me initially that malignant would mean larger margins, and that now they’re telling me that they don’t think they can take 5cm margins and are just going to settle for 1cm margins... oh my god I’m so...

Makes sense, I suppose. One thing I’ve always noted about mine, though, is that they only thump when they feel secure. Going to the vet? No thumping the entire time, but the moment we get home there’s a storm of thumping. NOW it’s safe to lecture me about how displeased they are. So to a certain...

Yep. It’s only the Sylvilagus genus of American rabbits that can’t jump, not the Oryctolagus genus of European rabbits. All pet rabbits, being European, are phenomenal jumpers that have been recorded to jump up to 6 ft. And as I noted, Delilah has personally jumped 4 ft straight up, back when...

Ah, also, when you say “impossible to domesticate”, domestication is a process of selective breeding that occurs over many generations, changing the animal’s behavior and even appearance at a genetic level. You can’t “domesticate” a single wild animal, you domesticate a species as a whole over a...

Indeed, the wild rabbits in the UK and Europe are the mostly of the Oryctolagus cuniculus species, and so can interbreed with domestic rabbits. The same is true of rabbits in Australia, where they are an invasive species. Actually O. cuniculus is quite infamous for how rabidly invasive they are...

Also to quickly clarify: the tenants of operant conditioning maintain that we can’t actually know what a being considers to be punishing or rewarding. Therefore a “reinforcer” (or reward) is simply something that results in an increase in the frequency or duration of a behaviour, and a...

Ultimately the problem with punishment is that it has to a) be more deterring than whatever reward they’re attaining through their behaviour, and b) not be associated with a discriminative stimulus. Also c) punishment prohibits a behaviour but it doesn’t provide an alternative acceptable...