Animal Welfare and Management in Rabbit Husbandry

Ensuring the welfare of rabbits in production and research settings demands a multifaceted approach that integrates housing design, social dynamics, health monitoring and environmental modification. Rabbits are inherently social and exploratory, yet commercially common caging systems often restrict movement and natural behaviours, leading to stress, aggression and physical ailments such as skin lesions and pododermatitis. Modern husbandry examines both group and individual housing schemes, weighing reproductive performance against behavioural needs. Welfare assessment protocols now combine animal-based measures (behavioural observations, physiological stress indicators) with resource-based data (space allowance, enrichment availability) to deliver a holistic evaluation. Moreover, management practices increasingly consider the effects of stock density, pen enrichment and regrouping schedules on social hierarchies and injury rates. Improved understanding of stress responses—quantified through biomarkers such as corticosterone—guides refinements in environmental enrichment and grouping strategies. Globally, these insights inform policy frameworks, certification schemes and on-farm guidelines aimed at reconciling productivity with ethical responsibility, thereby advancing sustainable and humane rabbit production.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Recent studies have developed automated computer-vision pipelines for continuous monitoring of social behaviour in group-housed breeding does and their litters. By integrating object detection, tracking and rule-based action classification, these systems achieve high precision and recall in identifying agonistic interactions, enabling the construction of time-dependent sociomatrices and quantification of dominance hierarchies. Such approaches offer scalable tools for on-farm welfare assessment, reducing reliance on labour-intensive manual observation and facilitating data-driven refinement of grouping and enrichment protocols.

Animal Welfare and Management in Rabbit Husbandry publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in animal welfare and management in rabbit husbandry across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Agonistic interactions: Social behaviours that include aggression, threat displays and dominance contests among individuals.

Environmental enrichment: Modifications to an animal’s surroundings that promote natural behaviours, reduce stress and prevent behavioural disorders.

Stocking density: The number of animals per unit area, which influences movement, social interactions and stress levels.

Corticosterone: A glucocorticoid hormone used as a physiological indicator of acute and chronic stress in rabbits.

References

1. Quantifying agonistic interactions between group-housed animals to derive social hierarchies using computer vision: a case study with commercially group-housed rabbits. Scientific Reports (2023).
2. Effects of group size and cage enrichment on social behaviour and skin injuries of breeding rabbits housed part-time in group. Animal (2023).
3. Behaviour and welfare assessment of autochthonous slow-growing rabbits: The role of housing systems. PLOS ONE (2024).
4. Environmental Enrichment in Rabbit Husbandry: Comparative Impacts on Performance and Welfare. Animals (2024).
5. Different regrouping schedules in semi group-housed rabbit does: Effects on agonistic behaviour, stress and lesions. Applied Animal Behaviour Science (2020).
6. Assessing Ulcerative Pododermatitis of Breeding Rabbits. Animals (2013).
7. Animal Welfare Assessment Protocol for Does, Bucks, and Kit Rabbits Reared for Production. Frontiers in Veterinary Science (2020).
8. Housing Rabbit Does in a Combi System with Removable Walls: Effect on Behaviour and Reproductive Performance. Animals (2019).