Do rabbits make good housepets?

[mysterygirl]

Excellent advice here - I'll just add that I've known people have rabbits as housepets and all the rest was found to be true in that case as well, especially the chewing thing. Mind your wires!

 

[berniedicters]

My daughter wants to get an indoors enclosure for when she goes out..wont the rabbit make the house smell?

Well, they will probably naturally tend to use the enclosure as their loo, too, so there will be a tendency for that to get a bit niffy.

However, assuming you clear out the enclosure every week or two, and use plenty of newspaper and hay (avoid wood shavings - the resins can upset delicate bunny nostrils), you won't have a problem - the "animal" smells of rabbits are not unpleasant and not even particularly strong,,,

 

[berniedicters]

bet you a tenner it was unneutered

esp in females they can become really aggressive if unneutered

Yeah, females are the stroppy ones when it comes to territory.

Males are the stroppy ones when it comes to competition (other rabbits, cats, people). Mine used to cop the right hump if I hugged a girlie for more than about 10 secs (he was an, ahem, post-divorce someone-to-have-around-the-house companion) and would stamp and "Ngggggggggrrrh" if it went on longer than he liked.

Added to which, he was positively proprietorial about women, so anyone who came back to the house/flat more than a few times was "his", and fair game for everything from lovable hopping around the ankles going "Unk" all the way up to the foot-flipping "oh, look, I just marked you with stinky wee" treatment. He never went in for the ankle-nipping (rabbit-language for "I've gotcha, now I am going to shagya") stuff, I'm glad to say. That'd be tough to have explained to the date I'd just brought home, apart from representing rather more competition than I like...


Definitely get them neutered. But the girlies are worse.

 

[Citizen66]

Protect cables and expect grief on your skirting boards like has been mentioned.

I don't know why the chewing thing is being seen as such a downside as you've got to expect that from most pets. My dog devoured half a calculator...

 

[UnderOpenSky]

As people say, adult rabbits have no trouble with cats - the cats are curious but they're too big. If anything, rabbits scare cats.

Depends on how tough your cats are. Most we've had would have run a mile at a fully grown rabbit, but we owned one who managed to drap back a rabbit, almost the same size as her, before she was fully grown. TBF she was a feline killing machine.