5 months too long to keep them separated?

[Deleted User]

I have a 6 month old female who was spayed a few weeks ago. I am getting an 8 week old buck this weekend. I know that they will not be together until he is also neutered. I will keep him in my bedroom, which is a place that she is not normally allowed but she does have free range of the rest of the apartment. There are two vets in my area that are experienced with rabbits, however one vet will not perform the surgery on buns younger than 6 months. So I will have to keep them separated for at least 5 months (4 months for him to be 6 months of age, then at least another month while he heals/stabilizes his hormones after the neuter. I plan on fostering a personal bond between myself and him during the time they are separated. I have never bonded rabbits and I wonder if this too long of a time to have the two buns in the same house without letting them meet? Will the scent of each other alone cause them to act up? They each have their own stuffies and blankets but I didn’t know if it would be beneficial at all to switch any of their items before the neuter since it would be over such a long period of time and his scent will be different after the procedure and healing process. If now is not a good time to introduce their scent to each other, when should I start? few weeks after neuter? or a full month? Any advice on timeline would be great! Thanks in advance.

P.S. The other vet would neuter as soon as testes descend. However, this was the vet that I brought Ophelia to for her spay and, while she healed perfectly and the incision site seemed to be done very professionally, I was extremely disappointed when I went to pick her up. The vet tech had given her an entire 2.5 oz bag of banana chips before the surgery and I was so ticked off about that, because there is NO reason that she should be given that many. I packed the whole bag because it was easier to keep it in the original container and I would have never assumed that they would give her all of them. Then, I learned that she was kept in the cat crate I dropped her off in for the ENTIRE time there, which infuriated me because she was cooped up for nearly 10 hours and I was told that they had a separate holding area for small animals away from dogs. Finally, not a single person could tell me if she had eaten anything since the surgery, which I was pissed at because she had already been post op for 6 hours and I needed to know if I was going to have an emergency on my hands if I couldn’t get her to eat by the end of the night. I paid 60$ for an initial exam and when I asked for a copy of anything documenting her weight and whatever else they did I was told “It looks like the physician didn’t write anything down about the exam, they just told us to tell you that she was “good to go”. Which was the final straw so I vowed to not return to that vet because I felt like they didn’t care about her wellbeing at all. So that’s why I have to wait until he is 6 months for the neuter at a different vet.

[Shadow13]

I’m not exactly sure but I think it would be fine since they would not know each other.

[Author]

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