How I Raise The Friendliest Rabbits | Gen 5 Their First Adventure

I'm raising this litter of six baby rabbits with daily handling, socialization and enrichment to develop friendly, confident pet rabbits. At just 9 days old, these baby rabbits had their first experience exploring real grass, and their reaction surprised me. If you're here strictly for **baby bunny cuteness**, skip to about **1:00**. That's when babies make their appearance. 🐰 I'm a rabbit trainer, and this is my fifth generation of rabbits raised specifically for pet temperament. By this age, I'm already watching for differences in how each baby responds to handling, novelty, stress and new environments, and I'm beginning to see some very different personalities emerge. They turned one week old on Friday, which makes them 9 days old in this video, filmed Sunday afternoon. All six babies are still doing well, and this was only my third day of intentionally picking them up and handling them twice a day. This was also the first day I've seen the entire litter this calm during a new experience. Normally when I introduce them to something unfamiliar, there is a lot of what looks like tiny popcorn bouncing and binkies. It's incredibly cute, but I'm also paying attention to what those behaviors may be telling me about their level of arousal and anxiety. My goal isn't simply to expose baby rabbits to as many things as possible. I want to introduce new experiences while keeping their baseline low enough that they can actually explore, investigate and learn that new things are safe. Today I put them on real grass from Fresh Patch for the first time, and the difference was fascinating. They settled almost immediately. Instead of bouncing all over the place, they sniffed the grass, explored, crawled around and eventually relaxed together. Their whole baseline seemed lower. They were still curious and engaged with their environment, but without what looked to me like the same level of anxiety I'd seen during some of their previous new experiences. And I'm already starting to notice individual differences in this litter. The little black "panther" baby has been remarkably calm from the very beginning. Even when I first started checking the nest every day just to count everyone and make sure they were alive, this baby stood out to me. She is currently my pick for potentially being one of the calmest rabbits in the litter, even as an adult. The tiny, skinny patchwork runt is also incredibly sweet and very, very calm. I'm less confident calling that temperament yet because he's so little, and I don't know how much of what I'm seeing is simply lower energy. But so far, he is an exceptionally gentle little baby. One of the babies who looks a lot like Lop, but doesn't have the white muzzle, has caught my attention in the opposite direction. I've noticed that baby becoming more activated during new experiences a couple of times already, with more bouncing and binkies than some of the others. That's one I'll be especially interested in watching as the litter develops. The two cream, gray and white babies have been wonderfully unremarkable so far. 😂 Calm, comfortable and neither has given me much reason yet to single them out in either direction. These babies are **3/4 Holland Lop and 1/4 American rabbit**. Lop's father was actually a stray rabbit who wandered into our yard, and based on his size, body and those enormous ears, my best guess is that he had American rabbit in him. They're only nine days old, so there is a tremendous amount of development still ahead of them. I'm not labeling a nine-day-old rabbit's permanent personality based on a few observations. What I *am* doing is documenting what I see now so we can follow these same six rabbits as they grow and see which early temperament differences remain, which disappear, and how each baby responds to the training and socialization ahead. This is Generation Five. And today, their world got a little bigger. 🐰🌱