Grooming Tips for your Rabbit

Transcripts

Aileen Kara Hudspeth: Hi, my name is Aileen Kara Hudspeth (ph) with Friends of Rabbits. We are taking about how to care for your rabbit and we are going to discuss now grooming. Since rabbits cannot spit and throw up their hair it is important for you to take care of some of these things that they may not be able to do at the level they need to. For instance, you have an option of tools to use to take care of excess hair. So I can use different types of tools, this rubber fingers on this brush can help pick up hair. There are types of combs that can be used that can easily help you get that excess hair off of your rabbit and keep them healthy. Now unfortunately, you need to be careful they have very delicate skin so you want to make sure that you are not rough when you are actually going over their skin with the brush. A tool like this might be a little rougher because of the metal, but you truly cannot press down too hard even with a rubber and damage their skin. You want to make sure that you can get a decent amount of hair while you are grooming because that will prevent you from having to do more grooming at an earlier date. Also, with grooming we have to talk about nails. Just like our nails, they too have the problem when their nails get too long and they can catch things, they can break, they can get caught in carpet. So what you need to do is you need to take tools whether it be a simple pair of clippers or cutters like this that have a little bit of a spring to them when I close it to help you. Some rabbits you will find, have dark nails so you will need to use a light behind their finger nail so that you can see where the quick is because rabbits, their quick is very close to the ends of their nails and you do not want them to bleed because if they bleed, you will need to use something like this stoppage, this is a quick stop or a home version of this would be flower to be able to blot that because it is going to help them clot. The end of these nails have a big tendency having problems with clotting. So for instance, I will take my willing participant here in my arms, now I will choose a simple cutters, we will hold him tightly, you can also use a towel to do this if I was concerned about him jumping, I am going to find a nail between the hair, I am going to find where the quick is and I am going to make sure that I trim above a quick, but giving myself some difference and some space to make sure that I do not miss and I would make sure that I get all of these nails including the ones on the sides that tend to hide under the hair here. This would probably be a better example. This nail is very tucked in, in the hair there in his paw and you will have to be extra careful because rabbits have the tendency to want to kick a lot with their hind legs. So as you can see here, I have used my fingers to push his foot forward and press his feet out stretched so that I might be able to make a small cut on his nails. Those where some tips on hygiene. Now we will talk about bunny proofing your home.