A happy and healthy bunny needs annual physicals just like humans do.

Loving us, feeding us the right things, and keeping our condos and eating dishes clean are things that must be done to keep us healthy and happy and living a long time.  There are two other seriously important things you need to do for us to keep us healthy.  One is to find a good veterinarian, one that specializes in rare breeds, especially rabbits, and take us to see him or her at least once a year for an annual checkup.  The other is making sure that we get exercise.

My own personal doctor-veterinarian, Dr. Dan Reimer at Adler Veterinary Clinic in the San Fernando Valley in California, is the best in my opinion.   (Of course, I'm terribly one-sided about the whole thing since he's taken care of me all but the first year and a half of my life.)   He takes my temperature, listens to my heart, checks for lumps and bumps that shouldn't be there inside and out, checks inside my ears for mites and infection (and that's a big chore since I'm a lop and my ears hang to the floor!), checks my eyes and inside my mouth, makes sure my teeth are okay and not getting too long, and checks my hocks for sores.  He even gives me a manicure (clips my nails)!  A girl couldn't ask for anything more.  And he always tells my mom that she's doing a good job taking care of me.  Why?  Well, it's because she checks me herself in between those annual checkups.   Sometimes when I crawl up into her lap while she's watching TV she stops watching TV and looks inside my ears to check for anything abnormal, and she looks through my fur to check for bugs or sores, and she brushes me to keep me from swallowing a lot of fur when I bathe myself, and she washes my face around my eyes with a sensitive-eyes saline solution, and she doesn't overfeed me or feed me the wrong things, and she makes sure that my "territory" is cleaned twice a day so I stay clean.  She just loves me, and that makes it easy for her to make sure I'm taken care of.

Exercise is so-o-o-o important also.  Normally, rabbits kind of exercise themselves by running around your home and jumping all over the place, but if you want to give them a little more space to run around and you have a yard, let them out once in awhile to enjoy the fresh air.   There are some precautions to take here, however. If you have dangerous animals in and around where you live (and that does include dogs that jump over a fence into your yard and want to play with your bunny or cats that are hunters), please make sure the area your bunny is running around in is protected from those animals where they can't get your sweet little bunny.  Also, be very cautious of the sun.  The heat can kill us.  Another thing to be cautious of is plants that we might eat but that are poisonous to us.

For those of you who do not live in or around the San Fernando Valley, check this page at The House Rabbit Society for a veterinarian near you who specializes in rabbits.