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wamplercathy

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I have a Chug and he is a big helper when we take in orphans. We are planing on adding meat rabbits to our family farm and was wanting to know about others experiences with dogs and rabbits. He helps with wild bunnies and we even have a few that have stuck around and play with him.
 
I both raise meat rabbits, and raw feed my dogs.

I find that my Newfoundland and Pitbull are wonderful with the rabbits.

I routinely do what I would never ever advise someone else to.

I leave the dogs and rabbits alone in areas where they could easily access each other for extended periods of time, and have been doing so for years.
The dogs are both mature animals and I know their characters well. (The Newf is the younger, at age 4, the pitbull is around 13 years old)

If a rabbit is loose, my boys usually just ignore them...or might be bothered to lift their heads to sniff noses...maybe, or maybe not. Most of the time, a bun can hop right onto one of the dogs, and the dogs STILL ignore them.

Lazy animals.
 
My akita has been wandering through my new colony while I'm working on it. The rabbits are used to her. She did get a little overzealous with some guinea pigs I temporarily released in there. She was following them around with her nose pushed in to their backs and accidentally stepped on one so it squeaked and upset everyone. The rabbits are mostly ignored unless there are babies. She looooves babies and I have to make sure she doesn't slobber them too much. I also feed her rabbit, usually whole, several times a week. I've given her dead kits to do with as she wants. I'm not sure if she eventually eats them or just shoves them around and mouths them until bored and leaves them somewhere outside for wildlife. I have no issues letting her shove her head in to a nestbox of live babies except the whole slobbering everything up problem. If something gets loose, babies are born, or something is not acting normal we get harassed until we go check what is wrong.

My husky is so so around the small animals right now. She is an excitable 6 month old puppy so not predictable but not overly intent on chasing something. I'd actually call husky prey drive low compared to japanese spitz and for sure it's not even half what my shiba is. Prior to feeding the shiba any raw she was not safe even on leash around other animals so that didn't make the difference. She will never be safe around other animals. I used to say any dog can be trained to be safe around small animals under supervision (leaving dogs alone with anything they could kill is another matter) but now I don't think you can possibly train the prey drive out of a shiba. There is nothing else to work with. Kill is their single thought through the entire day.
 
It really depends on the dog. Years ago we had an old English sheepdog who could not be trusted at all with rabbits. Our current one is very sweet towards them and while I would never leave her with one, she has never shown any indication she would turn it into a meal. Our chug, on the other hand, is unpredicatable. She loves chasing so is never trusted with rabbits.
 
Thanks for all the replies. I was hoping that I wouldn't have to exclude my Teddy Bear. He likes to bark, but that's the Chihuahua in him. I have been training dogs for over 30 years and have been a foster mom to domestic and wild animals for about the same.
 
If it's an issue of the barking, I can tell you that my buns are used to four barking dogs who randomly go tearing through the rabbitry to get to something in the yard. The buns ignore them. They may startle a little at first, but they soon become accustomed to the noise.
 
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I have no problems with my dog and the rabbits.
(and a little trivia, that broken black in the nest is a newborn baby Alaska)
 
We have 5 adult Aussie and Aussie/Border Collie crosses, a little terrier-thing, and two puppies. The rabbits don't bat an eye at them, and they too go racing through the rabbit areas on occasion.

wamplercathy":gplnvwkh said:
I was hoping that I wouldn't have to exclude my Teddy Bear. He likes to bark, but that's the Chihuahua in him.

As long as he doesn't go into a frenzy where he is focused on the rabbits and barking, it wont be a problem. With your training experience, I doubt you will have any issues.

When I brought my rabbits home I brought all of the dogs to see them individually. At the time I had a JRT that I was particularly worried about. I simply desensitized the dogs by approaching only far enough that they didn't get too intent on the rabbits. As soon as they got bored, I would move a bit closer. All dogs were on lead and at one point I tied each one to the chicken coop about 10 feet distant until they became so bored that they laid down. Eventually each dog was tied directly under the rabbits.

By not allowing them to scare the rabbits so that they raced around in their cages, there was never a trigger to the dog's prey drive so the whole exercise went very smoothly.
 
We have a 2 yr old Bluetick Coonhound female. As you can imagine, I was a bit worried when I first got the rabbits as she is a hunting dog. She stayed out by the rabbits the first couple of days but never barked or harassed them so I left her alone. Then I noticed she wasn't letting my 5 yr old son or our other dog go near them. I had to correct that behavior as far as my son was concerned, but I've never seen a hunting dog get so possessive of a prey animal. It's been 6 months and she is much less possessive of them but I still don't know if she had marked them as "her's" in a protective sense or because they were "her's" as in her food. :lol:
 
My akita sees the small animals as her's to protect despite the breed having a hunting, dog fighting, etc... background. They also have a guarding instinct though and that let's you modify any other drive to help the instinct to guard. She's the worst about guinea pigs. She just loves guinea pigs and must smell them, shove them, occasionally hold them in place so they can be groomed, and I want to kill her when the pups are born because she's such a pain. It was amusing one day. I took her in to my martial arts class cause her breeder ran the school and we'd just gotten a new pet. She had to run around to everyone all excited to exclaim she had a new pet. She even went up to people she was normally scared of even if she did suddenly shy a bit as she realized who she had just greeted to say we had a new animal. It's funny and highly annoying at the same time. She spent days telling my husband that she and I got new guinea pigs cause I no longer go to martial arts so she didn't have anyone else to excited wiggle at and lick. He was getting tired of a wet arm.
 
This is how things work around here. As far as I can tell, the dogs will not question the presence any animal that I given my permission to be here.
(Old dog, house rabbit, 3 legged de-clawed formerly stray cat)
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My Boxer is good with the rabbits but my Frenchie has a serious prey drive, if she had a normal jaw and weighed more than 10 pounds she'd be lethal
 
If my guys have prey drive, I've never seen a hint of it.

Other dogs might not be trusted in the same building as rabbits or even cats.

Prey drive seems to be pretty individualized in dogs. I think mine are particularly mellow.

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My current 11 year old Cocker and the rabbit get along famously. He's half-heartedly chase her occasionally but when she gets tired of it, she thumps at him and they go their separate ways. During good weather I'll find them sprawled on the porch together.

If my other Cocker, Sophie, were alive, there is no way I'd trust her in the yard with the rabbit. Her prey drive was fairly acute.
 

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Love all the pictures. I haven't gotten that to work yet. My chug is a barker but I've worked with him enough to get him to stop half way through a section. LOL. Given his breed the barking will never be gone. The best I can hope for is of him to stop when told.
 
Gunny, a GSD, was born at Rush Hour Rabbitry. He does a wonderful job of guarding them.The new dog, a Great Pyrenees, was raised as a LGD rather than for competition, and she bonded to them immediately. Wish Ii could say the same @ her connecting with Gunny!
 
Just brought home my new buns and Teddy Bear was over the moon. :p The buck, Cumin, was not excited about him :x , but the girls, Cream of Tarter and Coconut Cream, where making grunting sounds and touching noses with him. :p :lol: :lol: After I left the rabbitry he sat outside it and waited. :p

Is grunting a good thing? It sounded good. :?
 
We have 3 dogs. Bandit (is mine, he's a 2 1/2 year old beagle mix), Lilly (my sisters havanese mix), and Juno (my sisters..... Mix..... I think he's part Pomeranian.).

The little dogs, had killed 3 rabbits that have gotten out, including my favorite rabbit, my [only] mini lop doe Olivia.

Lily is the alpha dog, hands down, and I think that Bandit might have chased the rabbits too, but mainly because they were doing it.

My sister has her dogs in a pen in the yard (because they kept finding ways to get out of the yard), but Bandit has the yard, and he can jump in and out of the pen. He loves the bunnies. My avatar is him with a little 2 week old REW doe from my first ever litter (mini rex). I also posted a picture of him with another baby, a broken blue otter Jr buck.

With the colony (which is still a work in progress), my mini lop mix does are escaping in a daily basis, but Bandit just ignores them. Sometimes if I'm having a hard time getting them back in the colony, I'll even ask bandit to help me round them up, which makes it that much easier.

He LOVES the babies, and they don't seem to mind him, either.
 
I have a lab and a GSD that was a rescue, both females.

The lab is terrified of people, but absolutely adores the rabbits and wants nothing more to follow them out in the yard and eat poop as they leave it. Her and my old buck Sage used to play tag too before we got the GSD. Best buddies! I have no problem with her shoving her nose in the nests, and the only time she's ever got in a scuff with one of the buns was when she opened a feeder and was eating out of it, and the doe in the cage bit her through the wire. Our lab stood and barked at the cage, while the doe was glaring at her, "don't touch a pregnant ladie's food!"

Our GSD has good intentions, but being a rescue, she's a little too much for the rabbits at times. She's always great while they're in cages, but she loves to chase them out in he yard, which is too much For the rabbits, of course. The only time she's ever caught hold of one (I always supervise her if they're out, this one miraculously escaped his cage) she had pinned my champ buck with one law and was slobbering all over him. She meant well, but she was too rough and though the buck wasnt hurt, he was certainly freaked out by it.
 
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