How to Help Your Pet Rabbit Get Its Daily Exercise Indoors

Many people believe that pet rabbits are sedentary animals that live calmly in cages. But that’s far from the truth. Pet rabbits are extremely active and require a minimum of three hours of free-range activity in an enclosure no smaller than 32 square feet. That's about the area of a queen-sized bed.

Click Here For a Beginners Guide to Rabbit Care.

This exercise space doesn’t have to be outdoors. Rabbits exercising outside in enclosed spaces are still quite vulnerable to threats from reptiles and birds of prey that swoop in and snatch bunnies before their owners can react. No one wants that trauma to occur.

When Is the Best Time for a Bunny Workout Session?

Rabbits are crepuscular, so they are most active at dawn and dusk. That makes those times the optimal times for your pet rabbit to exercise. You may want to split it up into 90-minute halves depending on your own individual or family’s schedule. For instance, if you enjoy a good early morning workout on the treadmill or stationary bike, you might want to set up your pet rabbit’s exercise enclosure where you do your own indoor workout routines. That might be down in the basement, a spare bedroom, or other space. For an evening workout, you may want to involve your older children to engage and play with their bun for a couple of hours around sundown.

How to Create a Safe Indoor Exercise Space

There are households that give their litter box-trained pet rabbits free run of the home. Bunnies with these living arrangements usually get enough exercise on their own. However, they still require one-on-one attention from their owners. Whenever possible, make sure that your rabbit has at least two hours of interaction with you.

It is challenging to rabbit-proof an entire house for a free-range indoor bun. It’s far easier to dedicate one room to your free-ranging rabbit. The following should be done before turning your bun loose in a room:

• Dangling cords put up out of reach

• The room is free of flowers and plants

• Baseboards and other wooden furniture are blocked off

• No clothing is left on the floor

• There is suitable wood for them to chew on to wear down their teeth

• Everything toxic or harmful has been removed

Once you have a safe exercise area for your pet rabbit, you can begin to supervise their free-range activities.

What Are Safe Exercises for Rabbits?

Happy rabbits will hop and race around and turn binkies with delight. If you or your older children are supervising them and there are no predator animals in the home, your bun will get its exercise quite naturally.

Do you know that some rabbits can learn to walk, er, hop, on a leash? With a snug but comfy halter made for rabbits on them, you can “walk” them on a leash outside or even just around the house.

A rabbit is unlike a dog or even a cat that enjoys a game of chase. To your bun, that is predator behavior that at worst can literally scare them to death. At best, it could cause them to mistrust you because they never know if you might suddenly jump on them as prey.

Remember that rabbits in the wild are pretty much on the bottom rungs of Nature’s food chain. It doesn’t take much to frighten them into a “flight or fight” frenzy that is no fun at all for the bunny.

Friendly Ways to Ensure Your Bun Gets Exercise

Because bunnies hop around, you can make their exercise time more interesting by stacking objects to make sturdy platforms they can hop on and off. If possible, have an indoor tunnel or tube the bunny can move through from its sleeping quarters to its exercise area.

If you do this, your bun can get its exercise according to its own Circadian rhythms of dusk and dawn.

Regardless, you will still need to spend time petting and grooming your rabbit every day. Because they are social animals, they rely on these daily interactions to keep from growing bored. Novice rabbit owners will learn fast that a bored bun is a destructive bun.

Exercise Alone Isn’t Enough

To keep your small pet healthy and happy, exercise is vital. But so is a steady diet of healthful, farm-fresh hay grown in the mountain valleys of Southern Oregon and Northern California and delivered right to your doorstep by Rabbit Hole Hay.

There will be no more rushing out to the feed store only to find they have already closed. Instead, you schedule hay deliveries based on your bun’s needs. If you get another rabbit and need to increase your order, or if you board your rabbit and skip a week while on vacation, we can adjust deliveries as needed.