Female Rabbit Making Strange Noises.

[Nicole S]

Hi can anyone help ive got three netherland dwarf rabbits two males one female, but lately shes been making this strange grunting when the males approach her. See the videos and let me know what you think, id be extremely grateful for any advice on what this is or what I should do?

 

[SharminsMagic8]

Wow that is not something I have heard before. I guess the first question would be: are they altered?

 

[Blue eyes]

Sounds to me like she is protesting and doesn't like their attention. What are their ages? Are they fixed? Are you trying to breed them? Bond them?

 

[Moonika]

It looks like she is agitated by the bucks advances. My Netherland Dwarf doe does that when she is pregnant and doesn’t want to breed with my buck.
It seems as if he is trying to mount her in the second video? That’s probably what she is protesting about.

 

[ladysown]

She sounds like a pregnant doe telling the boy to back off politely.

 

[Preitler]

Exactly what ladysown said - that's how I check if a doe is pregnant or not, or at least if she thinks she is (false pregnancy). That doe isn't spayed, is she?

 

[Cookiemonster]

In the first video i saw the brown and white bun (not sure if thats the female) nip at the other bun. this is a sign that it doesnt want the other bun by it. if i were you i would separate them and see if it gets better. you can still have the out to play and interact with each other.

 

[Liung]

Delilah makes similar noises, though they're a little more moan-y, whereas this sounds more grunt-y. She makes them when she's trying to groom her butt and she's too fat to reach, heheh.

But then, Delilah is not a good standard for normal rabbit sounds. She is EXTREMELY vocal, probably because she's partially deaf and also was raised by dogs. She "pttttbb"s at me to say hi, chortles to herself as she eats her food, moans and groans at her chubbiness as she's trying to groom, does a creaky sound just before she stomps her feet, whistles through her nose in excitement...

So yeah Delilah makes similar noises but I highly doubt that her case is generalizable.

 

[Liung]

When she was alive, Picca was unspayed and her growls when she would pin her ears back and swipe at me (VERY grumpy bunny) sounded like the second video but several times louder and more furious. I described it as a cross between a pig squeal and a squeaky door hinge.

 

[Nicole S]

Thankyou that’s helpful, definitely think she’s getting annoyed at the boys but can’t decide if that’s because she is pregnant. I’ve had a few people say to me she may be pregnant but we took her to he vet and they couldn’t say for definite - I hope not because she is only 14 weeks and was due to be spayed in 2 weeks. And also sometimes she is allowing them to Mount her (obviously we take them straight off) would she allow this if she was pregnant?

One of the males is fixed but was only a couple weeks ago so could still be feeling rather hormonal.
The one in the video isn’t he’s still too small. And the vet won’t operate on him yet because of his size. He’s 6months and under 0.5kg
Her hormones must be out in full force cause the boys are beginning to be quite territorial toward her now too. As soon as the vet allows me to they will all be fixed
Thanks

Also they aren’t usually together like this they have separate hitches until they are fixed - they were just in their carrier while we swept the floor around them

 

[Liung]

Oh dear. I'm sure someone else will come in to confirm but I'm pretty sure that a male still has sperm for a while after being neutered, it takes a few weeks for it to be totally gone. I do know that you're not supposed to have them together for the first few weeks until the hormones dissipate for behavioural reasons.

If your other male is 6 months, he's fully sexually matured, and can definitely reproduce. I would start asking some tough questions of your vet, if a) he's showing that kind of uncertainty over a rabbit neuter, which is about the same level of difficulty as a cat neuter (I.e. One of the simplest surgeries a vet will ever do) and the fact that b) he'd seen your male to assess for surgery and also had your female booked for a spay and didn't tell you to keep them separated?? Or warn you that the one that is neutered won't be immediately sterile????

That doesn't sound like a vet familiar with rabbits or like a vet that will give you good advice and client education.

Remember that the typical vet is ONLY educated to treat cats and dogs. Only a livestock or exotics vet has the education to treat more than that, and even then a practice that has an exotics vet hardly ever sees rabbits. The House Rabbit Society has an excellent page on the kinds of questions you can ask a vet to make sure they are both qualified and experienced enough to treat rabbits. You will often hear that spay and neuter surgeries are much riskier for rabbits—this has not been found to be true for vets that deal with rabbits on a regular basis, and their success rates are on par with those of cats and dogs, with the most fatalities occurring due to complications from anaesthesia, less than 1%. This is roughly similar to the surgery risk in humans, btw. Anaesthesia is always risky to an extent, but for a surgeon that knows what they're doing, rabbits are not any more at risk.

 

[Laur]

My doe grunts at us when she is feeling territorial. She doesn't really like us messing her cage up, and stealing her "special poopies". In her case it is a warning, like a dog growling. She hasn't grunted at her husband, but she has started spurning his advances, and it seemed to be after she was certain that she is in a "family way" and no longer in need of his services. When they first met they were both sex crazed bimbos (nothing like what the books described, wham bam thank you ma'am style, more like porn star bunnies. (I can neither confirm nor deny playing tacky seventies style porn music for them.) I agree that she is trying to tell him mind his manners. You can let it play out in hopes that he will get the message of what she will and won't tolerate and then they can "hang out", but if it turns into a fight be very careful after that and remove him if she looks very agitated. I am newish to rabbits but I know cats take awhile for their hormones to come down if they are castrated after sexual maturity. They can't make sperm, but aggression and spraying etc. take longer to stop the farther past adolescence they have surgery.