Below are a few links to some of our favourite rabbit websites, including organisations and companies we believe promote good rabbit welfare.
Rabbit Welfare Association and Fund
This website is the best place to start if you have just adopted pet rabbits. If you are considering a rabbit as a pet, please look here first! The Rabbit Welfare Association and Fund is the largest organisation devoted to improving the quality of life of the UK's pet rabbits. Despite being one of the most popular pets, rabbits are amongst the most neglected. Through its campaigns and advice, the RWAF aims to change people's perceptions of pet rabbits; to many, a pet rabbit is viewed as a cheap, easy-to-care-for children's pet, which can be kept alone in a hutch. The RWAF strives to show that, instead, rabbits have many complex health and welfare needs, and this common myth that they are a great 'starter pet' is a main cause of neglect. With the right perception, owners are more likely to provide proper care, and in turn their rabbits' will respond by showing their true, incredibly intelligent, and fun nature.
We became members of the Association in 1998, to find information on how to keep a rabbit indoors. Over the years, we've learned so much through the RWAF and developed our approach accordingly. For example, our first houserabbit, Lupin, was kept in an indoor hutch when we were at work and overnight… now our bunnies have 24/7 access to our living room, and can also access a run on the patio – our living room is a bunny playground!
Through our membership of the RWAF, our vet was able to access the RWAF specialist veterinary advice service, and thanks to this, Mabel had several extra years of quality life, for which we are so grateful.
Our bunnies have starred on the cover stars a couple of times, and their photos have appeared many times within the magazine!
We highly recommend visiting the RWAF website, and it’s worth becoming a member.
This group supports the Good Practice Code for the Welfare of
Rabbits and aims to change the law in England, to improve the lives of pet
rabbits. The RAAG campaigns through the Rabbit Awareness Week (RAW), an annual
event which highlights a different welfare message to rabbit owners each year.
The RAAG website is another invaluable source of information on the best way to
care for your rabbits.
Pellets or nuggets should form only 5% of a rabbit’s diet, and muesli-type food should be avoided, as it encourages selective feeding. See our page on diet to discover what rabbits should eat.
Our rabbits eat Burgess Excel nuggets, and we scatter-feed them rather than placing in a bowl, so they enjoy foraging for them. Fortunately for our bunnies, Burgess Excel first became available back in 1998 – just as our first rabbit came to live with us!
Apart from making tasty nuggets, Burgess also invests in projects which promote rabbit health and welfare, eg. Rabbit Awareness Week, and webinars for vets. The Burgess website contains plenty of useful information on rabbit care.
Hay (or grass) should form at least 85% of a rabbit’s diet (see our page on diet to find out why it’s so important). Our bunnies have a definite favourite: Pillow Wad, and especially like their Timothy hay. They enjoy this quality dust-extracted hay, and we love that Pillow Wad is a friendly, family-run business, committed to sustainability – and as part of this commitment, their bags are made of potato starch, so we can empty the bunnies’ litter tray into these empty hay bags and throw them straight into our compost! The bunnies also love their range of herbs and forage.
Just4rabbits is a family run business offers rabbit safe enrichment, forage, and treats. The 'Forage and Enrichment' subscription box is a delight, both for bunnies and humans! It's full of seasonal, healthy forage and treats, and even an enrichment toy!
Another small business selling a wonderful range of dried herbs, forage, and treats... and even seeds, for those people considering growing their own! There’s also plenty of advice for rabbit owners.
This modular connective run system allows rabbits to exercise safely.
Oolong, the “head performance” bunny
The website featuring Oolong, a Dutch rabbit in Japan, was listed on our original Bunnymad links page, in 2002. The site no longer exists, but you can still view pages, courtesy of the ‘Wayback Machine’ archive. We think this deserves a place on our links page, as apart from being a pioneer in photo blogging, Oolong’s owner, Hironori Akutagawa, inadvertently started one of the first internet discussions about rabbit welfare.
Oolong was one of the first cult web stars, thanks to his patience while his owner, Hironori Akutagawa, photographed the rabbit with items balanced on his head. The first “head performance” photo was taken on May 24, 1999 – Oolong was pictured with a film canister on his head; from then on, throughout Oolong’s life, his owner, uploaded photos of him with an increasingly remarkable array of objects resting on his head. The photographer also continued to document his rabbit’s journeys.
Hironori created the blog for his acquaintances and didn’t promote it, so initially it attracted only a modest number of visitors. However, this changed when a blogger from Syberpunk (a blog focussing on quirky Japanese culture) stumbled across the website. He realised he’d found something special, and kept it to himself for a while, just tantalising his friends by showing the photos but not sharing the source. Then, accidentally, he shared the link and soon visitor numbers to Oolong’s site rocketed. In August 2001, Oolong went viral.
The picture of Oolong with a dorayaki (red-bean pancake) on his head was most popular, soon “Pancake Bunny” or “Bunny Wafflehead” became one of the most popular memes of the early 2000s, with the caption “I have no idea what you’re talking about, so here’s a bunny with a pancake on its head”. Internet users posted it on message boards in response to any foolish posts. It’s still used occasionally on today’s social media.
The blogger from Syberpunk admitted to feeling guilty that Oolong had become so popular and that the photos were often an “object of mockery among the internet community” (you can read his account here).
Apparently, Hironori never made any money from the website, or from the book which was published (2009), featuring every photo of Oolong (Hironori gave permission). He loved receiving positive feedback – emails from people who respected Oolong, but wasn’t happy about the meme, or about the emails accusing him of cruelty. Hironori published his response online:
“Hello Everyone,
<<I am not good at English, this message got big help by my friend who lives in USA>>
Thanks for visiting my Japanese website. This is a site devoted to me and my rabbit, Oolong. I built this site mainly for Japanese rabbit lovers, but realize that I have a lot of international visitors who are curious about me and Oolong, judging from the thousands of hits I receive daily and many e-mails written in English from all over the world.
Oolong is 7 years old and was born in an outdoor rabbit group in a park in Hokkaido. Hokkaido is the northern-most island in Japan. He is a tough, healthy rabbit since he had a wildlike childhood. Recently, however, he has developed abscesses on his cheek, and has had to undergo two surgeries last spring. It doesn’t still fully recovered, but is getting well now.
I want to reassure everyone out there about the nature of my site. This is a site to demonstrate the natural days of Oolong and me. Period. To my surprise, I realize that this site has been spread around some American chat forums and/or passed around as office humour. I am really surprised at the number of visitors that come to my site, but I hope no one misunderstands the nature of my site. Some visitors have written me e-mails, accusing me of being cruel to my rabbit and that I am abusing my pet. This was never my intention when I included numerous links to photographs, showing Oolong’s unique ability to hold objects on his head. This is not a site to mock rabbits, or demonstrate animal abuse. I’m sure you understand it if you see whole my site.
Oolong is so calm and patient -- he never gets angry when I take pictures of him. When I put various objects on his head, he stays still for a minute. This is just a result of an intimate relationship between me and Oolong. The main theme of my site is not to show these ‘headperformance’ links, and it’s not my hope to propagandize nothing but the strangeness of his headperformance over the world. Oolong’s headperformance-- many foreigners seem to feel it ‘crazy’, but Japanese people feel it just cute and funny. It is the difference of international feeling.
I’m sorry I can’t make a special English edition of my website, but I don’t have enough time to translate everything on the site. However, if you roll over the photographs with your mouse, you can see pop-up captions in English. Please use Internet Explorer to view this.
Anyway, thank you for checking out my site and I’m so
happy that so many
people all over the world have come to love Oolong.
Thank you and take care!
Oolong’s owner”
Oolong died in 2003, aged 8 – Hironori posted a photo of the grave, showing a snowy mound with a pair of carrots protruding, representing ears.
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