Rabbit Care for Beginners in Australia: Diet, Housing & Health Essentials

Why hay is the entire ballgame

The single biggest determinant of whether a pet rabbit thrives or struggles isn’t the brand of pellet you pick or the cage you put them in — it’s whether they’ve got unlimited grass hay in front of them, all the time. The RSPCA’s position is unambiguous: grass or grass hay should make up 80% of what your rabbit eats, with leafy greens forming most of the rest and pellets used sparingly. Hay does three jobs at once — fibre for gut motility, abrasion for tooth wear, and bulk to keep the caecum populated with the right microbes — and nothing else on the menu hits all three.

What hay to buy, and what to skip

Oaten hay, timothy hay and meadow hay are the dependable everyday picks in Australia. Lucerne (alfalfa) is too rich in calcium and protein for adult maintenance and should be limited to growing kits and nursing does. Pellets are useful as a vitamin-and-mineral top-up, but a tablespoon or two a day is plenty — most beginners feed far too many. Greens are where you can be generous: roughly a packed cup of leafy greens per kilogram of body weight per day works well, with treats like fruit or carrot kept to small amounts only.

Buy hay in proper-sized bales from a feed store or pet retailer that turns over stock fast. The smell tells you a lot — fresh hay smells like a sunny field; old hay smells musty or like dust. We’d skip anything stored in plastic for months, anything that’s gone yellow, or anything that crumbles to powder when you grab a handful.

On greens specifically, variety matters more than any single “superfood”. Rotate through cos lettuce, bok choy, coriander, basil, dill, mint and the leafy tops of celery and broccoli. Stay away from iceberg lettuce (too watery, very little nutrition), avocado (toxic), onion and garlic (toxic), and any bagged supermarket salad mix that includes rocket as the main ingredient — rocket’s high in oxalates and shouldn’t dominate the bowl. Treats like banana, apple or carrot are fine as the occasional reward, kept to a tablespoon or two a day. Most beginner over-feeding is treats and pellets, not greens.

Teeth that never stop growing

A rabbit’s incisors and molars grow continuously throughout their life — typically a couple of millimetres a week — and they rely on the constant lateral grinding of fibrous hay to file them down. When the diet skews towards pellets, treats or soft greens, the molars in particular start growing into shapes they shouldn’t: sharp spurs that lacerate the tongue and cheek, and roots that push back into the jaw. The damage is invisible from outside the mouth until it’s well advanced.

Warning signs are subtle and easy to miss. A rabbit who drops food while chewing, who suddenly prefers soft food over hay, who drools or has a wet chin, who paws at their mouth, or whose face starts looking lopsided is probably already in significant dental trouble. Catching it earlier is much cheaper and much kinder than catching it later. Chew toys aren’t a substitute for hay, but a varied chew menu with apple wood, hay balls and untreated wood blocks gives the molars more wear angles than hay alone.

Housing and predator-proofing for Aussie backyards

Rabbits need more space than most beginners expect. The RSPCA cites the Rabbit Welfare Association’s minimum of 3 metres long, 1.5 metres wide and 1 metre high for a pair, with the practical caveat that this is the floor, not the ceiling. Most off-the-shelf “rabbit hutches” on the market hit closer to 1.2 metres long — fine as a sheltered bedroom and feeding base, but never as the whole enclosure. The pattern that works in Aussie conditions is a weatherproof hutch paired with a secured exercise run, either permanently attached or attached during the rabbit’s daytime hours.

Australia adds a few specific design problems. Snakes (especially in summer) and foxes can both work a poorly latched door, dogs and cats from neighbours can dig under fencing, and afternoon western sun in a Queensland or northern NSW backyard will kill a rabbit in an hour. Practical wins: site the hutch in deep shade, never on bare concrete in summer, never against a fence a fox can climb. Use proper sliding bolts on every door rather than the cheap hook-and-eye latches most hutches ship with. Bury the run wire 20–30cm into the ground or sit it on a paving border so nothing digs in or out.

Indoor rabbits work beautifully too — they live longer on average, they’re easier to monitor, and they avoid the predator and climate variables entirely. A rabbit-proofed room with a litter tray, hidey-holes and a baby gate to keep them out of trouble is a perfectly legitimate setup. The trade-off is that they need active rabbit-proofing of cables and skirting boards, because curious rabbits chew everything within reach.

The Aussie-specific health priority: RHDV vaccination

Australia is a country where rabbit calicivirus is a daily threat to pet rabbits, in a way that’s just not true in most of Europe or North America. RHDV1 was deliberately released in the 1990s as a feral rabbit biocontrol; RHDV2 arrived in 2015 and is now the dominant strain in the wild rabbit population. Both are highly contagious — they spread through insect vectors, on shoes, on grass cuttings — and they kill quickly once a domestic rabbit is infected.

There’s good news and there’s good news. The good news is that the Filavac VHD K C+V vaccine protects against both strains. The other good news is the schedule is genuinely simple: a single subcutaneous shot from 10 weeks of age, repeated annually for life. The Australian Veterinary Association recommends it specifically because it’s the only available vaccine in Australia that gives proper RHDV2 cover — the older Cylap product only covers RHDV1. Book it in with a rabbit-experienced vet at the 10-week mark, set a yearly reminder, and treat it as non-negotiable. Indoor rabbits aren’t exempt — the virus can come in on your shoes.

A practical note on access: not every Aussie general practice stocks Filavac, partly because it’s been imported under a special permit and partly because rabbit-only consults are less common than dog or cat ones. If your nearest practice doesn’t carry it, ask which clinics in your area do — the rabbit owner Facebook groups and your state’s Australian Veterinary Association directory are both useful for tracking down a clinic with a regular order in. Plan ahead too: the protection takes about a week to develop after the shot, so don’t book it the day before a backyard barbecue or a kennelling stint. And when summer mosquito activity climbs, that’s the moment vaccinations matter most, because insect vectors are the primary route the virus takes to a domestic rabbit.

Desexing, handling and companionship

Two more decisions matter more than most beginner guides give them credit for. The first is desexing. Female rabbits have an extraordinarily high rate of uterine cancer if left intact, and desexing both sexes also dramatically reduces hormonal aggression, spraying and territorial behaviour. The procedure isn’t cheap, but it’s a one-off investment that prevents both major surgery later in life and the bonding problems that come with intact rabbits.

The second is companionship. The RSPCA Knowledgebase is direct: rabbits are a social species and shouldn’t be kept alone. A single rabbit becomes a lonely rabbit, and lonely rabbits become anxious, destructive or withdrawn. The solid setup is a bonded, desexed pair — and the bonding works best after both rabbits have been desexed. If you’re learning rabbit care via a guinea pig you already own, don’t bond them; the two species have different communication signals, different dietary needs, and the bunny can bully or transmit infection.

On handling: rabbits aren’t lap pets in the way cats or small dogs can be, and a lot of beginner stress comes from forcing the wrong kind of interaction. Sit on the floor, let the rabbit come to you, scratch the forehead and behind the ears, never lift them by the scruff. Many adult rabbits will hop on for a head-rub session and hop off again — that’s the bond working as designed.