#26 - PART ONE - PREPARING FOR BONDING - INTRODUCTION

🐰 Welcome to a New Season of The Bunny Coach Podcast

Preparing for Rabbit Bonding

Even thinking about Bonding rabbits can feel overwhelming — especially when you’re hearing horror stories online, juggling busy life schedules, or worrying about your rabbits hurting each other.

In this brand new season of The Bunny Coach Podcast, Fiona (The Bunny Coach) is here to help you feel calmer, more confident, and more prepared to start the bonding journey.

If you’re thinking about getting your rabbit a friend, or you’re already knee-deep in bonding worries, this season is for you.

🎧 What This Season Is All About

Throughout this season, Fiona will guide you through:

• 🏠 How to create a neutral bonding space
  Even if your rabbits are free-roam or have already been all over the house.
• ⏰ How to make time for bonding
  Without the pressure of myths like “you must bond for four hours a day.”
• 💭 Common bonding anxieties and worries
  Including fear of fights, stress, and feeling like you’re “doing it wrong.”
• 🧠 Reassurance and preparation
  So you don’t go into bonding feeling panicked or alone.

In this first episode, find out why you should listen to me, and how I am going to help you feel better and more prepared for bonding! 

Fiona x

PS IF YOU LOVED THAT, YOU WILL LOVE THIS .....

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PS IF YOU LOVED THAT, YOU WILL LOVE THIS .....

To give your rabbit the A+ Bun Life they really deserve, hop on over to Fiona's Happy Bunny Club, your safe, one-of-a-kind space to get personalised, one-to-one guidance and feedback on your exact situation, from a Rabbit Expert, who has been exactly where you are and now supports hundreds of rabbits and their guardians every year!

Fiona's Happy Bunny Club is an amazing fun and supportive community of other bunny nutters with no drama (because we all know that people who aren't crazy about bunnies just don't get us!!), a whole library of bunny care classes for you to learn more about and develop an amazing bond with your precious fur baby, PLUS REGULAR LIVE BUNNY CARE MASTERCLASSES, QUESTION AND ANSWER SESSIONS, AND DISCUSSIONS WITH GUEST RABBIT EXPERTS

Find out all the amazing benefits here -

FIONA'S HAPPY BUNNY CLUB - MONTHLY MEMBERSHIP

THE ONLY BUNNY CLUB LIKE IT IN THE WORLD WHERE YOU GET PERSONALIZED SOLUTIONS AND ON-DEMAND CLASSES,

COME ON OVER - YOU'LL LOVE IT!!

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...

Transcript

Intro to new pre bonding series

 [00:00:00] Hello everybody.

Welcome to a brand new season of the Bunny Coach Podcast. This season I'm going to be talking to you about preparing for bonding. This is something I experience a lot with the amount of bonding that I do online and in person, and the same concerns come up over and over, so in this season, I will be helping you to feel better about bonding and feel more prepared to give it a go

 we will be dealing with making a neutral space even if your rabbits are free roam or have been all over the house. How to make time for bonding. , Despite the myths that you hear online that you must do at least four hours a day. I can help you fit it into your busy lifestyle. You do have to commit some time to bonding, but you shouldn't have to put your entire life on hold. Our bunnies are our world, but they're not the only thing that we have going on. And also, I will be helping you to feel better about some of the common anxieties and worries that people have around bonding. So if this is you, if you are [00:01:00] thinking about bonding or you are thinking about getting your rabbit a friend, then listen on for this new season, I look forward to helping you.

 So why listen to me, that's the first thing in case you guys don't know me, , my name is Fiona and I am The Bunny Coach.

I live in Dublin in Ireland and I run The Rabbit Rooms, small animal boarding. So we started that in 2014 because we had a, a number of rabbits ourselves and we couldn't find anybody to look after our rabbits when we went on holiday. And we thought other people must have this problem as well. And lo and behold, yes they do.

And there's very few places in Ireland do. Rabbit boarding. So that's how we started. We now board all sorts of animals. It's not just rabbits. We thought it was going to be just rabbits, hence the name, the rabbit rooms. But we board a lot of Guinea pigs as well. Reptiles, we used to board birds, but I don't anymore because, they're noisy and they're rabbits don't like it.

So, , we don't do that anymore. , But , hamsters, , mice, gerbils, chinchillas. , Pygmy hedgehogs. We had a giant tortoise wandering around [00:02:00] our garden last year for much of the summer. I think she was 80 years old. , So basically most things except cats and dogs, and also birds. , So in 2014 we started the boarding.

We now care for hundreds of rabbits every year, , and hundreds of other animals as well. , Full-time job for me now because. It's got so busy. , And then in 2016, I had a customer come to me and say, can you please help me with bonding my rabbits? They were desperate. They were like, , we're gonna have to rehome one of our rabbits, and I'm sure a lot of you're in this situation as well, you get a second rabbit for your rabbit.

You think that it's, they're gonna be friends. You have this dream of them living together happily. And if the bonding doesn't work out or you don't know what you're doing, you end up with two sets of runs in the house. You're climbing over everything. You're parkouring your way to the bathroom. You're trying to make sure they don't get out and don't get into each other 'cause they're gonna, , have a fight If they do or they have already.

, And they were living like this in an apartment and they were like, this is just, we can't go on like this. One of these rabbits will have to be, [00:03:00] rehomed if you can't make it work. And I said, look, I've never done it before. I do know the theory of it. If you want me to try, I am quite happy to give it a go.

But I've never done it before. Hands up. So let's see what we can do. And they said, please try. So I did that was in 2016. And it worked and I've been doing it ever since. So I think I've bonded around 270 sets of bunnies at this stage. , pairs, Rios. Um, the odd quad, I don't bond, , bigger groups than that here because,, it needs more than a week.

And generally speaking, with the boarding and everything, what I do is I offer Monday to Friday for bonding and then they go home at the weekend. , And generally speaking, they're not at the stage where they're in a position to go home when it's a bigger group than that. They need more than that, and it's more time that I'm able to commit to it.

But I have helped people bond online,, up to nine rabbits. the theory is pretty much the same. It needs some tweaks because there's extra dynamics involved, but I'm able to help virtually with that, but I don't do it practically here.

And then, during COVID then I started offering, , bunny care classes because we were bored. [00:04:00] Everybody was bored, and I get asked a lot of the same questions when, people are boarding, about diet and litter training and grooming and all that kind of stuff. And I thought, well, it might be fun to do classes online and give us all something to do.

And from there, my bunny club online was, , invented Fiona's Happy Bunny Club and that's still going. And then I started helping people on the phone with. Bonding issues, , because they started coming to me because they knew that I was bonding practically and they wanted the help.

And a lot of people got a second rabbit during lockdown because they looked at their rabbits on their own and thought, yeah, when I go back to work, they're going to need some company. And then ran into bonding problems. So I started just offering phone calls to my customers, and now I offer Zoom calls around the world.

, Helped people in Canada, Israel, Australia, America, the uk. , Poland, Iceland, , lots of places in Europe, Spain, yeah, so all around the world, this is the beauty of Zoom that , we can talk and we can help each other. So I have a lot of experience and as I say, I hear a lot of these [00:05:00] things, this all over and over, and I know it stops people sometimes from bonding because they're so caught up about it.

They're anxious about it naturally. And it's very normal. You don't want your fur babies to hurt each other. You're rabbits may already have had a fight because you've put them together and they've gone straight into fight mode or they've got into each other. , Or you've heard horror stories online.

So, I offer a lot of reassurance to my bonding customers who drop their rabbits to me. Sometimes they're dropping 'them to me 'cause they don't have time, but sometimes they're dropping them to me because they're anxious and then they're very anxious when they get them home five days later. And of course I walk them through all the support they need after that to get the rabbits settled in at home and everything.

So I'm used to the anxiety and the worries and the concerns and the wonderings that people have. So I can help you. As you can imagine, I hear a lot of the same concerns over and over. And the terrible thing about it is that people think that they're alone feeling like this.

They feel like they're stupid or something because they feel anxious about it. They feel embarrassed about that. They feel, that nobody else feels the way they feel about the whole thing. So it [00:06:00] just helps to know that you're not alone, right? Because the whole thing is daunting. And I have to say, even when I have rabbits in, at the start of the week and I start bonding them, I'm always a little bit anxious.

I've done 270 sets of bunnies. So you're absolutely not alone. And the thing about it is, is that. It is very normal fo feel that way because,, they're your fur babies and you don't want them to hurt each other. , And you hear all these horror stories online. And of course.

As human beings, we like to tell the negative things. You never hear people saying, oh, I had this amazing, experience with Ryanair or whatever airline. You only hear people mo moaning about it. And I think a lot of that is what happens online. You hear the negative things about bonding online and then it makes you worried about it 'cause you think that it's always like that.

And it's not necessarily always like that. There are times when rabbits fall in love straight away or that it's quite an easy bond. , And there are times of course where it's difficult and it's really difficult or it doesn't work out. So there's. All ends of the spectrum. , But just, I think it might help you all to hear that you're not alone and to hear about the worries that other people have and , at least if you can go into this [00:07:00] feeling like, okay, so it's not just me that feels like this, this is normal.

And I'm gonna give you some coping skills. I'm gonna help you with setting things up. , So that you feel more prepared. Because if you feel prepared going into something, then that really helps. And at the end of the day, this is a skill that you've never used before. You don't know what you're doing 'cause you've never done it , if you're new to bonding.

So it's normal to be daunted by it., And it helps to know a little bit about what the process is gonna be like before you start, and then you can feel more prepared for the whole thing.

So next episode, we will be talking about making a neutral space to bond your bunnies in. Even if your bunnies are free roam, even if you have a small space, or even if your rabbits have been all over the house, you don't need to move out in order to bond or go to somebody else's house.

I can help you to do that from your own home with the space that you already have. I can help you to make it work. So listen in for the next episode. I'll see you then.