Talk:House rabbit

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[edit] Citation for redirect

I'm not sure how to indicate the citation for a redirect, to show that the name is common, so for now, I'm putting them in the talk page. Here are a couple high-profile web sites that use the name "House Rabbit": [1] [2]. --Ed Brey 22:01, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Split from Domestic Rabbit

While it makes sense for this article to redirect to Domestic rabbit, since all house rabbits are domestic and since the domestic rabbit article contains a lot of info for house rabbits, IMHO it would be even better to split off the content specific to house rabbits and put it on this page. For more discussion of this, see Talk:Domestic_rabbit#House_rabbit?. --Ed Brey 22:25, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] vaccinations

the statement that rabbits do not need vaccinations is entirely false and should be removed. There are a variety of illnesses which rabbits need to be vaccinated against, including indoor rabbits, as many diseases are carried by fleas.

Additionally rabbits should be spayed or neutered, especially females which start to become prone to ovarian cancer after 4 years of age. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 208.137.151.22 (talk) 09:37, 13 May 2007 (UTC).

[edit] Moving content from Rabbit

The Rabbit page had a big and rambling section on pet rabbits. I've taken pretty much all of the content and moved it to the relevant sections here, trying to make sure that it doesn't clash with the existing material. Well, I think it's partly successful, but I invite house rabbit experts to fine tune it. Arikk 07:35, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Pronoun usage

A mixture of pronouns had crept into the rabbit page. I cleaned it up to use exclusively the gender male pronoun. This better captures owners' affections than "it" and avoids the wordiness of he/she, ambiguity of unnecessary plural phrasing, and inconsistency of plural pronouns without plural phrasing. I'm pretty sure that no one will get confused such that he thinks the article only describes male rabbits, since the gender male pronoun construct is very well known. --Ed Brey 17:43, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

I'd actually much prefer 'it' being used. 'He' just doesn't seem right, since rabbits have two genders. The purpose of the article shouldn't really focus on capturing owners' affections. Even so, I could find 'it' used affectionately. Kutera Genesis 20:39, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

He in this context is gender inclusive, thereby accounting for both male and female rabbits. I agree owner affections isn't a focus per se, but rather an aspect of the article. The biggest issue I see in using he is whether it is awkward because, unlike in a home situation, the individual pet is unknown. Thoughts on this? We do have to be careful with it because most people I know are offended if I refer to their pets as "it", even though I'm sure some aren't (hence why you could find one or more references to an affectionate use of it). The key isn't the offense itself, but rather the reason for the offense: those same people don't think that it correctly expresses the value of the pet, similar to how it doesn't express the value of a human. We wouldn't want an article on house rabbits to inaccurately connote their value. --Ed Brey 18:25, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

As a point of reference, the primary source for the article, Rabbit for Dummies, uses the gender-inclusive he; random example: the first paragraph of the "Barbering" section on page 179. --Ed Brey 17:28, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

The problem I see is that it isn't terribly encyclopaedic. I just changed the pronouns on the Rabbit#Rabbits as pets section to be neutral before I realised this entire article was written that way. The problem is that the grammar currently used describes a single rabbit, and, in some cases, a single owner. As an encyclopaedia, we should be describing house rabbits in general, and therefore using neutral and impersonal terminology. Thus, gender neutral pronouns (like "it" and "they"). Again, as Kutera said, we don't need to capture the owners' affections. This isn't a guidebook to rabbit ownership like Rabbit for Dummies, and it isn't here to cater to the owners of house rabbits. We don't need to be affectionate; it's actually better to be somewhat dispassionate. It helps to ensure we maintain a neutral point of view. More to the point, the article on Humans doesn't use "he" to refer to a generic member of the entire species. I imagine that more people would be offended to hear a human referred to as "it" than a rabbit ;)

All this talk of political correctness and being dispassionate aside, the male pronoun is preferred over "it" when speaking of living creatures as opposed to inanimate objects. Perhaps this is not universally accepted, but nothing is. It is, however, overwhelmingly accepted as a feature of the English language. Rabbits aren't "its," they are Hes and shes. The standard English pronoun usage rules must prevail in this as in all other English language wikipedia entries. Gender neutral pronouns removed.Jimmy Hammerfist (talk) 14:59, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

I ran a simple Google Books count to get a feel for the frequency of how often each type of pronoun used in literature for animals kept as pets (compare [3] and [4]). In the comparison, the non-neuter pronouns came out ahead of the neuter one. I'm open to following a clear standard, but I haven't seen one demonstrated. Do you have any good sources? --Ed Brey (talk) 18:47, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

As for "he" being gender neutral, remember that that is not universally accepted. It's being more and more widely agreed that using "he" as a gender-neutral pronoun is politically incorrect at best. Again, it's better to use "it" and "they" because nobody is going to be offended by them (even though different members of the rather factious English scholarly community prefer different gender-neutral pronouns). --BMKane 13:04, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

Singular phrasing often more clearly expresses encyclopedic generalities than plural phrasing. For instance, consider “Rabbits are easy to litter train, especially if they have been spayed or neutered.” Is this referring to multiple rabbits in a single pen and their interaction? Or would this apply just as well to an isolated rabbit? The singular construction avoids the ambiguity: “A rabbit are easy to litter train, especially if he has been spayed or neutered.” Within singular forms, “he” better suits a pet than “it” for the same reason as it does a human (albeit to a lesser degree). According to meta:Quest for gender-neutral pronouns, this thinking came after the Victorian era (granted, there is no citation). As for the acceptance of the gender inclusive “he”, if the publisher of the Dummies book is using it rather than alternatives such sentence recasting or singular “they”, that’s enough acceptance for me. --Ed Brey 18:14, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Binky article

I undid an edit that made the term binky a link to a page not yet created. I contemplated this when introducing the term early in this page's history. It seemed unlikely that there would be enough content to make a worthwhile wikipedia article for binky, to I used elected not the make the broken link. I believe that still stands, but if someone wants to present a vision of a binky article, I'd certainly be interested. --Ed Brey 17:07, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Citation holes?

This article was flagged as needing additional citations for verification; however, there aren't any specific fact tags in the article. Does anyone know of anything in the article that isn't backed by one or more of the references? --Ed Brey 01:51, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Pocket-sized house rabbit

This article was tagged as falling within the scope of the Pocket pets work group. However, I've never heard of anyone putting a rabbit in his pocket. Has anyone else? I think rabbits may have been lumped over-broadly in with other lagomorphs. --Ed Brey 01:50, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Inclusion of fly strike in health concerns

I removed the reference to fly strike from the "Health" section. I agree that it is an important problem, and indeed gets good treatment in Domestic rabbit. The problem is that listing all the possible health problems in the beginning of the health section would overwhelm a reader with too much technical info, and just listing just the one root cause obscures the others (unless fly strike is especially common; if so, please say so). More useful is to list symptoms that the reader would readily recognize. Perhaps there should be a better reference to the list of heath problem causes. One possibility would be to fork the list in Domestic rabbit into its own article, which could be readily linked from the "Health" section of House rabbit. Thoughts on that? --Ed Brey (talk) 15:21, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Fly strike is one of the most common reasons for emergency presentation of rabbits. The In Practice article (Pract. Cousquer 28 (6): 342.) referenced details the rapid time scale of progression of the condition without treatment, and the consequent deterioration of the prognosis. This section starts with a list of symptoms that require urgent veterinary attention. Many rabbits live happily with a head tilt for years, not to say that if a rabbit suddenly develops a head tilt it doesn't need to go to the vets, but it depends on the cirucmstances so it seems unbalanced to have that on the list rather than fly strike where every hour counts. As you say it is a list of symptoms so maybe it should say maggots, rather than fly strike. Maybe the list should be removed as it is not complete and therefore not particularly helpful. I tried to put a reference up to Vet Help Direct http://www.vethelpdirect.com which basically provides an automated triage service. Its free to use, all the content is by vets and I felt it fulfilled Wiki's criterea ie 'Sites that contain neutral and accurate material that cannot be integrated into the Wikipedia article due to amount of detail' 86.157.97.79 (talk) 21:15, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the info, especially on the prevalence of fly strike. I wasn't away it was one of the most common reasons. Given that, I agree that it has a place in the house rabbit page health section. Inclusion in the first paragraph list would be OK, but I think that a richer inclusion would be ever better, one that gives an owner enough information to identify the symptom. This might involve some restructuring of the paragraph. Feel free to be bold. The vethelpdirect web site had the major downfall that its disclaimer said that it should be not be used by anyone outside the EU (seems over-restrictive to me, but that's what they say). That made it less than ideal for linking by Wikipedia. What do you think? --Ed Brey (talk) 01:21, 3 May 2008 (UTC)