Rabbits are frequently housed in inadequate conditions — evidence-based minimum standards and the welfare science supporting them.
Rabbit welfare is in crisis largely because public understanding of rabbit needs is shaped by decades of marketing that normalized wholly inadequate hutch housing. Rabbits are not small, low-maintenance pets that are content in a small hutch — they are active, intelligent, social animals who need as much space as a medium-sized dog, constant access to companions of their own species, a diet primarily of fresh hay, and daily opportunities to explore and forage. The gap between what rabbits need and what most rabbit owners provide is enormous, and the welfare cost of that gap is carried silently by millions of animals who lack the demonstrative pain responses that would signal their suffering to owners.