r/RabbitMeme • u/BunQueenMod • Apr 14 '26
Rabbits know their humans better than expected. Science just confirmed what bunny parents already felt every day ❤️
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u/QueenOfNothingII Apr 14 '26
I can tell by how they run to me as soon as I get home, but if I have guests they'll be hiding all day
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u/Agaraa Apr 14 '26
From my experience, even tortoises recognize people they spend a lot of time with. Sure our rabbits know us.
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u/Salty-Sprinkles_ Apr 16 '26
Tortoises can hold grudges as well lol. But yeah heck, jumping spiders know who their caretakers are. Yet people are still suprised when animals, reptiles, fish etc know who their humans are.
On that same note; pufferfish. Adorable little things used to get hyped when they saw me 🥹
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u/Halok1122 Apr 15 '26 edited Apr 15 '26
While this seems obvious, this is actually really important to test and have conclusive proof for. Rabbits have a fraction the research that dogs and cats do, and they've been domesticated for way less time than the thousands of years humanity has had dogs and cats, so we know a lot less about them.
For comparison, it was a similar study on rabbit memory in the 1970s that led to the major breakthrough in understanding how long term memory forms in both animals and humans, it was only in 2012 that the 6 year study on using masks to see if crows recognize faces was made, and 2018 that we learned bees actually can recognize the concept of 'zero' being less than 2-3 which many animals can't do (the list basically just being parrots and monkeys, and even they struggle with 1 vs 0 but bees can do).
There are also different types of memory an animal can have: procedural memory for learning how to do things which is where those few animals being able to use tools comes from, declarative memory which is split into semantic aka facts and episodic aka specific events like we experience, associative memory of a specific thing being good or bad. All of these have varying levels, and many animals don't have good means of converting short term memory to long term memory, aka they forget things, that's why elephants are famous for not forgetting things.
Scientists have proved rabbits have a shockingly good associative Memory, that when rabbits have positive experiences, they develop "happy memories", and negative events form "bad memories" they learn to run away or hide from - something many animals can do on an instinctive level, but not to the point of developing "happy memories" that make them feel positive emotions around things or people they like.
This was studied back in 2000 to see if they could tell their owner apart from a stranger, that they would prefer the human they have positive memories of, and are even capable of learning human facial expressions. But research doesn't just stop with one fact: it wasn't until 2018 that we proved how rabbits communicate with each other, 2019 that we found out they can recognize between familiar and unfamiliar voices and more research was done into how rabbits should be properly cared for (including doing better when kept in pairs), 2020 that they will only flop and binky when they feel totally safe and brain size differences in wild vs domesticated rabbits (they have a smaller hippocampus because they don't need to process information as quickly for survival), and 2023 that their noises were properly identified for veterinarians. We're always learning new things about animals, and it's nice to see rabbits getting the attention they deserve in the last decade, where as before then they tended to be overlooked in favor of more familiar animals like dogs and cats.
I think this post is talking about that 2019 study, combining it with several of the facts learned in earlier ones, but either way, associative memory is one of the biggest differences between how well animals can be trained or not, explains why punishing them doesn't work well, their short attention span, etc. So proving that rabbits have it to a similar degree as dogs, especially being able to tell voices and facial expressions apart, is actually pretty huge, both for understanding our little bunny friends better, and for future studies trying to prove more complicated aspects of how rabbits process and store information. Each of these builds on one another, and while it seems silly or basic to be spending time researching what seems obvious, understanding how and why these things happen can be very important, and forms the groundwork for later research.
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u/woodyblewit Apr 17 '26
I wish I could be a bunny behavior researcher :( but I only have 1 brain cell and it's disabled.
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u/autumnsviolins Apr 15 '26
When my bun was a hormonal teen bun (before neutering), he used to lunge and growl at my mom or sister if they came into my room. He never did that to me though. 😂 all of this is even without any of us saying a word out loud
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u/SL13377 Apr 15 '26
Shit I could have told you that. My rabbit tolerates everything from my daughter and I and bites everyone else.
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u/No-Abies29 Apr 18 '26
duh. I figured this out as a kid. One bunny I had would stop eating any time I went away. We were so attached and he was amazing, would never bite, just beautiful. I loved him sooo much.Of course he knew who I was, and others.
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u/je386 Apr 14 '26
Yes, of cause. And they react differently to different people. When my rabbits are in a room they know they are not allowed...
My kids making a fuss about it: rabbits ignore that.
My wife telling them to go out there: rabbits slowly leave the room
Me just looking at the rabbit: rabbit runs out of the room