1) Should i first buy a harness and harness train him?
Yes. Harness training is a big part of rabbit hopping. It ispossible to have your rabbit hop without a harness (my rabbit does aselection of on and off harness jumping), but it is a great tool whenfirst teaching your rabbits. Before attempting to jump anything withthe harness on, make sure your rabbit is comfortable on his harness.
2) How big do the jumps have to be?
The highest that a rabbit has ever jumped is around a metre high(100cm), but there's probably only a handful of rabbits in the worldwho could reach that height. My rabbit's record is 46cm, but I knowplenty of people manage to get their rabbit jumping higher than that.My rabbit doesn't really like to jump wide jumps, but they are also animportant part of their training if you ever plan to enter shows. I amplanning on training my rabbit to jump wide jumps soon. Start off withjust a pole, then raise it a few centimetres, then up a little bit oncemore, until they reach their limit. Rabbits under 8 weeks old shouldnever jump higher than 5cm, and rabbits around 8 weeks to 6 months oldshould attempt anything over around 35cm, because they are stillgrowing and injuries can occur. After that, try and get your rabbitjumping courses, and high jumps.
3) How long does it take to train a rabbit to show jump?
It really depends on the rabbit. My rabbit is one year old, and Ihave been training him since he was around three or four months old,give or take. He has taken that long to get up to 46cm. But there areprefessional rabbit hopping trainers who can get a rabbit up to thatheight in a couple of weeks. It mainly took me this long because I waslearning it all by myself. I didn't have any training references,because I didn't know rabbit hopping exsisted until I was a good 4months into his training. Plus, Ollie (my rabbit) wasn't bred for thissort of thing, but just likes jumping, and can develop bad habits veryeasily, so I had to take it slow. For example, when jumping jumps thatare too high for him, Ollie would jump over it fine, but then kick outwith his back legs and knock it down. It took me a good 3 months to gethim out of this habit, and he still does it sometimes. Anyway, it cantake anywhere from a month to three years, and some rabbits never learn.
4) Do you actually compete in real shows?
No, unfortunately. The closest show to us is a small rabbitfanciers club in NSW, a good 5 hour drive from here, and my parentswon't let me go that far for just a rabbit show. I have what we call'mini shows' with my best friend, who owns two rabbits that also dorabbit hopping. Every couple of months I'll take my rabbit over to herplace, or hers to mine, and we'll set up a couple of courses and giveeach other scores, just for training purposes. Last time, we didn'thave a show, but did training excercises. We were getting our tworabbits who had never even seen each other before, to jump the samejump at the same time and just keep going. Ollie kept trying to sniffthe other rabbit, but otherwise, they were amazingly good. Anyway, ifthere are any shows near you, then you should compete, and see if allthat time of training was worth anything.
Rabbit hopping is a great way to keep a rabbit fit whilst doing a funsport. I wrote a more detailed training peice on my rabbit hoppingwebsite, if you want to have a read of it.
http://mikolikaninhop.tripod.com/training.htm
If you have any questions, feel free to PM me, and I'd be happy to answer any questions you have.
Rachel.
