About Hop & Home

Hop & Home is a blog about living with pet rabbits — feeding them well, housing them properly, reading their behavior, and knowing when something is wrong.

Why we started this

There's no shortage of rabbit content online. The problem is how much of it is wrong. Rabbit care advice has a specific quality problem: a lot of it was written once, years ago, and has been copied between sites ever since without anyone rechecking it. Some of it is outdated. Some was never true to begin with.

A few examples we ran into just while writing our first handful of posts:

• "Rabbits live 2–3 years." This reflects how rabbits were kept decades ago — outdoor hutches, poor diets, no spay/neuter, no access to exotic vet care. A well-cared-for indoor rabbit typically lives 8–12 years.
• "Pine bedding is dangerous." Half right, and the missing half costs people money. The hazard is phenols in raw softwood shavings. Kiln-drying drives them off, which is why kiln-dried pine pellets are both safe and one of the cheapest litters available.
• "80% of Easter rabbits die or are abandoned within a year." Repeated on hundreds of sites, usually credited to National Geographic. It isn't a real statistic — Humane World for Animals traced it and found no study behind it, and the attribution doesn't hold up either.

That last one is the clearest example of the pattern. It's a frightening number, it spreads because it's frightening, and nobody checks it. Meanwhile there's a real, documented figure sitting in the same source — 81% of shelter rabbits arrive unspayed and unneutered — that makes the point far better.

How we write here

We look things up. Breed weights come from breed standards. Space recommendations come from welfare organizations like the Rabbit Welfare Association & Fund and the House Rabbit Society. Health claims come from veterinary sources. When we cite a study, we link it so you can check our work.

We tell you when the evidence is thin. A 2019 study found lop-eared rabbits have more ear and dental problems than erect-eared rabbits — a genuinely useful finding worth knowing before you choose a lop. It also only examined 30 rabbits, so we say that too. You should know how much weight a claim can carry.

We don't play doctor. For anything medical, our job is to help you recognize a problem and understand how urgent it is — then get you to a rabbit-savvy vet. Some rabbit symptoms are genuine emergencies. A rabbit that stops eating can be in serious trouble within a day, and no blog post substitutes for an exam.

We'd rather be useful than alarming. Rabbits are rewarding pets. The goal isn't to scare anyone off — it's to make sure people who get one know what they signed up for.

Get in touch

If there's a topic you'd like covered, a question about your own rabbit, or something here you think we've gotten wrong — please tell us. Especially that last one. A blog about correcting bad rabbit information should be willing to correct its own.