Blog Entry 4- Touchdown with some Hands on Experience

The Ventura County Animal Shelter is a special shelter in that it has a hands-on approach when it comes to their animals and volunteers.  The volunteers and rabbits tend to get the most benefit out of this.  A part of this hands-on approach is to have volunteers bring the rabbits outside in the x-pens and allow them to run around for a certain amount of time.  This allows the rabbits to expel their pent up energy and to promote socialization when the volunteers spend time with the rabbits. I believe this connects volunteers more closely to the animals they work with, which has positive effects for both human and animal.
The hardest part is bringing the rabbits inside.  It can be quite difficult to catch them and you have to be careful about how you catch them.  You never hold a rabbit by the ears, because it causes brain damage.  What I do is, like with dogs or cats, go for the scruff which is an area of extra skin behind the rabbit’s neck and closer to the upper back area.  The scruff is created by their mother pulling and moving their young when they are babies by using their mouths to grab that piece of skin.  Rabbits can move quickly; sometimes I have to wait until they calm down or grab them by the lower back hip area in order to capture them at all.  It’s important for rabbits to experience being picked up by a human because rabbits are going to need transport to and from their hutch or area where they sleep. It makes them feel vulnerable as a prey species.  Rabbits will never like being picked up, but they can get used to it and be more accepting of it, which allows the benefits of socialization.  Another tactic includes covering their eyes with your hands while holding them, to prevent them from trying to jump out of your arms.  It can also calm the rabbit down.  Rabbits do not have depth perception, so they have no idea that when they’re held, jumping from a certain height might not be a good thing.
Sometimes rabbits go to extreme lengths to avoid getting picked up. Once Daisy was trying to get a rabbit out from the x-pen and the rabbit somehow found its way into a deep hole that had been blocked off by a rubber ball and a brick.  Daisy laid flat on the ground and put her whole arm inside.  The hole was so deep, she could barely touch the rabbit’s tail, even with her arm all the way up to her shoulder in earth.  It took a good hour and a half to get the rabbit out.  The rabbit came out fine, but Daisy’s arm was scraped up.  What we do for rabbits!