Always wash your hands after coming in contact with rabbits or their saliva, urine, blood, feces, and/or bedding materials. This is the primary method of preventing laboratory acquired infections associated with the use of rabbits- even if you use gloves.
Protect Yourself and Your Family from Germs
Wash your hands thoroughly with soap and water right after handling your pets or anything in the area where they live and roam.
Most rabbits love being pet. Many will calmly sit with you for long periods of time while you give them a nice massage. Petting is a great way to calm an anxious rabbit down and to bond with your pet rabbit. However, it's important to learn the techniques to pet your rabbit in a way that they will love.
Rabbits that are housed outdoors, captured from wild populations or that are purchased from a pet store may carry zoonotic diseases. Zoonotic diseases associated with rabbits include pasteurellosis, ringworm, mycobacteriosis, cryptosporidiosis and external parasites.
It's especially important for young kids, older adults, and people with weakened immune systems to wash hands regularly because they're more likely to get seriously sick from germs animals can carry. In a perfect world, you would wash your hands after every time you touch your pet.
93 percent of pet owners cuddle their pets, 70 percent allow the pet to lick them, 63 percent sleep with their pets, and 61 percent kiss their pets. Only 31 percent wash their hands after playing with their pets, and 42 percent do not wash their hands after feeding their pets.
Washing your hands right after being around animals, even if you didn't touch any animals, is one of the most important steps you can take to avoid getting sick and spreading germs to others.
Tularemia, or rabbit fever, is a bacterial disease associated with both animals and humans. Although many wild and domestic animals can be infected, the rabbit is most often involved in disease outbreaks.
Routine bathing
Rabbits are clean animals and will groom and wash themselves. Companion rabbits will wash and groom each other too. You will need to groom your rabbit frequently especially during a moult to remove all the hair they shed, but even during a moult you do not need to bath your rabbit.
If a rabbit scratches or bites your child, they could develop a reaction or infection. This is the most common child health problem with rabbits. To reduce the risk of bites and scratches: get advice from your vet about claw trimming.
Rabbits generally have a few sensitive spots where they dislike being touched - their dewlap (under the chin), whiskers and feet. Some rabbits are also extremely sensitive about their ears or tail.
Hold rabbits gently but firmly - ensure one hand supports their back and hindquarters at all times. Help them feel secure by holding all four feet against your body. Never pick rabbits up by their ears - this would be extremely stressful and is highly likely to injure them.
They also love getting a good back scratch around the shoulders. That said, they tend not to like being touched on the ears, neck, feet, stomach or tail. Usually, my bunnies are most receptive to petting when they're relaxing after a meal.
Licking: Licking is a way bunnies groom each other. If your bunny licks you, it's a sign of affection as you'll often see pairs of bunnies grooming each other this way. A bunny lick is a sign of a bond.
I would give the rabbit 24 hours to adjust, even if the rabbit knows you really well before you take it home. This has as much to do with your rabbit getting used to its new home as it does getting used to a new owner. So, it's best to just give it some space at first.
It's also true that while rabbits are also clean animals, they are not as pristine as most cats. On the other hand, people are much more often allergic to cats than rabbits, so that is another aspect to consider.
While rabbits can carry parasites like tapeworm and roundworm, their waste is not known to transmit any diseases to humans. However, a single rabbit can excrete over 100 pellets in a single day, which can make a flowerbed or backyard unpleasant.
House-training rabbits. Rabbits are very clean animals and it's easier than you might think to litter train them. we recommend you get your bunny neutered, as even litter trained entire males can spray around the house and it's more difficult to train them out of this behaviour once they have started.
As rabbits have become increasingly popular domestic pets, rabbit allergies experienced at home or at the workplace have become more common. Physicians should be aware that rabbit exposure may cause severe respiratory allergic reactions even in non-atopic individuals.
Urine from a healthy pet, or any animal, shouldn't be harmful. However, if the animal is infected with an illness or bug, it can be dangerous. A common bug that pet rabbits suffer from is Encephalitozoon cuniculi – a microorganism that can cause neurological disease.
Tularemia is an infectious disease caused by the bacterium Francisella tularensis. It affects both humans and animals, and is typically found in wild animals such as rabbits, muskrats, and beavers. It is also known as Rabbit Fever because hunters can get the disease from contact with infected rabbits.
Give dogs a way of “opting in” to social contact by using the “3-second rule” of petting. Pet for no more than three seconds, then stop. Does the dog nudge you or move into you to say keep going? Then go ahead and resume.
Petting zoos and farms can be a source of E. coli transmission. Reduce your risk of becoming ill by visiting hand-washing stations immediately and thoroughly washing your hands.
All that said, you should always wash your hands with soap and water after peeing, says Newman. It's the best way to reduce the risk of getting sick or spreading germs to others.