How to Get Rid of Rabbits Without Killing Them

Need rabbit removal in your hometown? We service over 500 USA locations! Click here to hire us in your town and check prices - updated for year 2020.

Homeowners, gardeners, orchardists, landscapers, famers and agriculturalists, as well as generic property and land owners, can all come into conflict with the humble wild rabbit. This is usually brought about by the rabbits never-ending appetite, a creature that can just eat and eat and eat, usually through all the plant life you wouldn't want it to attack. In some cases, the rabbit can be helpful to humans, consuming vast quantities of wildflowers and weeds, helping to keep them from spreading to far and wide. It is when the animal encroaches on human territories that the problems arise, not just with crops, with also with the burrows. Usually long and extensive, they have the potential to make a patch of land entirely unstable. Buildings can even collapse with a well-established rabbit burrow beneath it.



There are plenty of property modifications that you can make to try and keep rabbit-related problems to a minimum, and these will include methods such as erecting fences, adding electric netting, and other physical barriers. Those are the types of methods that have been shown to have the best success — the ones that put a physical barrier between the animal and the spot you're trying to protect.

If you want to erect a fence around your land, you will need to know that hares can jump farther and higher than a rabbit, but still won’t scale a fence 3 foot or more high unless they are being chased by something that wants to eat them. This means that a fence that is at least three foot high around your land will go some way to keeping the hopping critters out.

You could choose a traditional fence — something like wood, for example, but this can affect the lighting in your garden or land. If you’d rather not block everything off quite like that, or you don't want something quite so big in terms of fencing, you should look towards a traditional chicken wire-style fencing system instead. These will still allow the light in whilst keeping the rabbits, as well as other wild critters out.

Of course, as much as a fence will protect you above ground, you will need to remember that rabbits and hares will burrow beneath the surface too. This means that you should add a further physical layer of protection underground. This is easily done using chicken wire again, but you will need to dig a trench, of sorts, before placing your chicken wire in and then filling the hole right back up again. You will also want to make sure that you have enough chicken wire to make it sit in an “L” shaped fashion. The very bottom, horizontal line of the “L” shape will prevent the rabbits from burrow under and then up.

If you add fences above and below ground in this manner, making sure that the ‘apron’ of mesh wire underground is at least one to two feet deep, rabbits will have no way of getting into your property.

Of course, you could always look at electrical style fencing systems, which have shown to be quite effective at keeping a large number of wild animals at bay. It’s a pretty extreme approach to take, and quite an expensive one too. It’s probably not the greatest option when you're trying to deal with one rabbit, for example. Against a colony or group of animals, rabbits or otherwise, an electric fence can have great success.

As a general rule, electric style fencing systems for animals only work on a temporary or short-term basis. As a long term fix, they’ll prove to be expensive to buy, expensive to run, and also quite expensive to maintain too. With all the costs involved with the permanent erection of electric fencing, you might as well have just hired in a professional to do all the other stuff we’ve recommended to you.

Fencing doesn’t always look that great, so if that's not the option you’d like to choose, there are other approaches you can take to get rid of rabbits. Repellents, especially scare tactic-based ones, have shown to have some success, but we would always advise you to take such success stories with the proverbial grain of salt. There’s a higher chance that repellents won’t work and, just as with the electric style fencing, repellents can be expensive to use over a long period of time. If those repellents are the only tools you're using, you will need to use them all the time — 100% of the time. As soon as you stop using them, there's a good chance the animal will come right back. Even if that one doesn't, a whole host more nuisance wildlife will soon fill their shoes.

You could always turn to trapping to solve your rabbit problem, of course, but there are many problems that arise with the capture and release of wild animals, especially rabbits. There is a higher chance that the animal will die within just a few hours or days of being in their new territory. Disorientation is the likely culprit, which can lead to rabbits coming in the path of vehicles and main roads, of even right into the mouths of passing predators. They also won't be able to find food or water easily, and dehydration, hunger, and then starvation will very soon kick in.

Also, you might be introducing these rabbits into an area where rabbits weren’t present before. This disrupts the existing ecosystem, potentially putting other animals in danger as there is now even more competition for food and other resources.

The final thing that we need to say about the trap-and-release method for rabbits is that the rabbits will often come right back if you have not released them far enough away from the building you removed them from. Also, the burrows where the rabbits once lived will still be present, encouraging other animals, including other rabbits, to move right in after you have removed that one.

Lethal control is sometimes necessary with nuisance wildlife just like rabbits. If this does not happen, the populations of them would just grow too large. It would become more and more difficult to keep them under control, and the animals soon start to adapt to better suit their conditions too. Some rabbits in the UK, for example, have become resistant to the diseases that once would have kept their populations under control. Not only that, but they have also adapted to breed throughout the year, rather than just during specific times of the year.

We highly recommend checking out the laws and regulations surrounding wild and nuisance animal control, especially as far as rabbits are concerned. Different states will have different rules. In some states, trapping and destroying these creatures is only allowed during certain times of the year.

Read about How to Get Rid of Rabbits Without Killing Them.
For more information, you may want to click on one of these guides that I wrote:
How To Guide: Who should I hire? - What questions to ask, to look for, who NOT to hire.
How To Guide: do it yourself! - Advice on saving money by doing wildlife removal yourself.
Guide: How much does wildlife removal cost? - Analysis of wildlife control prices.