This Is What Everyone Gets Wrong About Rabbits

Publish date: 2024-05-07

Actually, rabbits totally bite and scratch. If they didn't, they wouldn't have gotten very far as a species. It's not just predators that need to be aggressive in order to survive — prey animals need that, too, because once they're caught there's still hope of being able to bite and scratch their way out of a bad situation. And your holy terror of a toddler definitely counts as a bad situation.

According to the House Rabbit Society, some rabbits can become so aggressive that their owners don't feel like they can handle them. Yes, that's right, Monty Python wasn't actually being funny with the whole killer rabbit thing — some rabbits really do bite, kick, lunge, and chase their owners. Aggressive behavior in rabbits is most common at the age of 4 months or so, when the rabbit is reaching the equivalent of puberty, so really, you can consider it somewhat on par with your teenager's habit of eye-rolling, door-slamming, and engaging in long Fortnite marathons without food or water.

Anyway, the good news is aggressive behavior in rabbits can be fixed — sometimes literally fixed if the rabbit gets spayed or neutered before the problem gets out of control. Time, patience, and good training techniques will fix the majority of remaining aggressive behavior. If only the Rabbit of Caerbannog had had educated owners, The Holy Grail would have been a very different movie.

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