Learning Rabbit Tricks With The Sound Of A Click

By GABRIELLE SHIOZAWA

Moapa Valley Progress

When people think of training animals, they think primarily of dogs. But the members of the local “Fast-N-Furriest” 4-H Rabbit Club are looking to change that.

Sue Dreyfus, who has headed the project for the past two years, says that bunnies are frequently dumped in parks and on other public sites when their owners tire of keeping them. This has become a major problem in Clark County. According to Maria L. Perez of the Las Vegas House Rabbit Society, rabbits are the third-most purchased pet and the most-dumped animal in the county.

A potential solution, according to Dreyfus, is bunny training. “Our end goal is to have our rabbits perform a few tricks or obstacles at the county fair,” Dreyfus said. “People just don’t know what to do with their bunnies. Hopefully, if they see us at the fair and learn that their rabbit doesn’t have to stay in the cage and act like a lump of fur, that they can actually be trained, just like a dog, that might lessen the unwanted rabbit problem.”

Sue’s daughter, 4-H club member Abigail Dreyfus, has been training her rabbit, Panda, for the past few months.
“It’s really fun to do,” Abigail says. “I’ve been getting him to stand up and do some hops so far.”

In the future, Abigail hopes to train her rabbit to do even more agilities.
“We travel all over the southwest and California and do rabbit shows,” says Sue, “But other kids don’t have that opportunity, so I wanted to teach them something else they could do with their rabbits.”

To begin, Dreyfus brought in professional clicker trainer Kylie Campbell to the Logandale Cooperative Extension office on Saturday, Dec. 2. Besides helping with the bunny-dumping dilemma, Campbell informed the 4-H club that training rabbits has many other benefits as well. These include mental and physical enrichment for rabbits, a stronger bond between pets and owners, improved confidence, and giving the animals a longer, happier life.

The clicker program is based on a rewards system. To start off the training course, Campbell instructed participants to click, using either a small handheld clicker or a pen, just before immediately feeding a treat to their rabbits. This simple activity trains the rabbit to expect a reward when they hear a click.
Why use a clicker instead of a verbal command?
“The click is concise and consistent, so it’s familiar for the rabbits,” Campbell explained. “Voices change in tone and volume, which is why they can be confusing.”

Once a rabbit begins to respond positively to a clicker, the training can move on to the first objective: getting a rabbit to touch a target, in this case the end of a large wooden spoon, with its nose. As the rabbit achieves the goal, the clicker immediately sounds, and a treat follows.
“This is a foundation behavior for any animal,” said Campbell. She went on to explain that the trick, once mastered, can be used to guide rabbits into cages, make them spin or jump over obstacles, sit up on their haunches, give high fives, sit still for grooming or exams, and more.

At first, progress was slow. “Rabbits are really timid,” Kylie explained as she walked around, helping the club members. “It may take a while.”

She also suggested that continuing the training at home in a less overwhelming environment would yield better results than the noisy 4-H classroom would.

With the help of both Dreyfus and Campbell, rabbit training will become more and more widespread.
It’s a program that will surely multiply as time goes on, just like…well, rabbits.