5 things that help when your rabbit is moulting everywhere

Daily grooming is what keeps pace with a rabbit that can't vomit up what she swallows — every tuft you don't remove by hand gets removed by her tongue instead, and then has to travel the full length of her gut. The bit most people miss: a moult runs as a wave from head to tail over two or three weeks, not all at once, so the coat can look finished on the shoulders while the rump's only just cutting loose — stop grooming there and you've really only done half the job. I learned to watch for this properly fostering a lionhead-cross called Biscuit one March: skip 48 hours mid-moult and her droppings would already start looking smaller and oddly shaped, little dumbbells instead of neat rounds.

The brush that's right at the start of a moult is often wrong by the end, because loosening a top layer of fur and clearing dense, stuck-on undercoat aren't the same job. A soft rubber grooming mitt or hound glove is what you want early on, or for a short-coated breed like a Rex or dwarf lop all the way through; a wool-coated breed — lionhead, angora, cashmere lop — needs a wide-tooth metal comb to get down through the felting undercoat once the top coat's gone, because a mitt just skates over the surface and misses mats forming underneath. If you ever see pink or flaky skin, that's your cue to go gentler or switch tools, not to keep pressing on with the one that's working.

Slightly damp hands pick up the fine, static-clung undercoat that a dry brush glides straight past, because the moisture makes loose fur cling to itself into a clump you can lift off whole instead of drifting into the air. It's the step that gets the last bit a brush always misses, and it works on the spots most rabbits won't sit still for a comb near — belly, behind the ears, round the tail — where a determined brushing session gets you nipped.

Constant hay is what actually moves swallowed fur through a rabbit's gut, because it's the fibre and near-constant chewing that keeps everything — fur included — travelling through instead of sitting still and matting into a blockage. Moulting rabbits need noticeably more hay than their usual baseline, right at the point appetite might dip from feeling hot and itchy, so matching your normal amount isn't actually enough. Take this one seriously: if appetite drops, or droppings get smaller, fewer, or stop for around 12 hours at any point during a moult, that's a same-day call to an exotics-experienced vet, not a wait-and-see — this is a vet visit, not a checklist.

Fur drifting round the hutch or across the rug doesn't just look messy — it's fur your rabbit, or her bonded companion, is likely to eat again next time either of them flops down for a groom, because rabbits don't distinguish between fur still attached and fur lying on the floor. In a bonded pair this doubles the problem: the companion rabbit often grooms the moulting one and swallows a share of her loose fur on top of their own moult, so the one shedding less can still be at real risk. Clearing the immediate area daily, not just vacuuming when you get round to it, is part of managing the actual fur load, not just tidiness.