How to Catch a Rabbit in Your Backyard, Safely

The first question is not how to catch it. It is what you are catching, because the right answer for an escaped pet is almost the opposite of the right answer for a wild one.

Telling them apart

A rabbit that lets you walk within a few feet in the middle of the afternoon is somebody’s pet, and it will not survive long outdoors. That one is worth catching.

Recovering an escaped pet rabbit

Patience beats speed here by a wide margin, and the whole method is about making the rabbit choose to be caught.

1. Stop everyone chasing it. Get children and dogs inside first, before anything else
2. Keep it in the garden. Close gates, block the gap under the fence, shut the side passage. Containment first, catching second
3. Build a funnel. Garden fencing, exercise pen panels or sheets of cardboard, set as two converging wings leading into a corner or into the open hutch
4. Put its own hutch inside the pen, door open, with its own bedding in it. The smell of its own hutch does more work than any bait
5. Its own food — the familiar pellets, its hay, a handful of greens. Not novel food
6. Then sit still, twenty feet away, and wait. A frightened rabbit settles in twenty minutes or so and starts feeding
7. Close the pen rather than grabbing the rabbit. Once it is inside the funnel, walk calmly to the open side and close it
8. Lift correctly when you must: one hand under the chest, the other supporting the hindquarters against your body. Never by the ears or the scruff alone

Dawn and dusk, and the overnight pen

• Rabbits feed at dawn and dusk. A rabbit that cannot be caught at two in the afternoon is often easy at six in the evening
• Leave the pen up overnight with the hutch and food inside. Many escaped rabbits walk back into their own hutch unaided in the first night or two
• A second rabbit helps. If you have a bonded companion, putting it in a carrier inside the pen is the strongest draw there is
• Check the obvious hides before assuming it has gone: under the shed and the decking, behind the compost bin, in a hedge base, in a dense bed

A live trap, if penning fails

For a rabbit that has gone feral in a large garden or moved to a neighbouring one.

• A medium live trap — roughly 24 to 30 inches, single-door
• Bait with fresh greens: dandelion, carrot tops, apple, cabbage, clover. For a pet, its own pellets and hay
• Trail the bait in, with the main pile beyond the trigger plate
• Set it against a hedge or wall, where rabbits already run, not in open lawn
• Cover the trap with a towel to make it feel like a tunnel
• Check it every few hours, and at first light. A trapped rabbit in the sun is a dying rabbit
• Never leave a trap set overnight unchecked

Wild rabbits, and the nest in the lawn

Mostly the answer here is to do nothing, and it is a better answer than it sounds.

• A shallow fur-lined scrape with young in it is a normal nest. The mother visits only at dawn and dusk, deliberately, so she does not lead predators to it. It looks abandoned all day and is not
• Mark it and mow around it. It empties in about three weeks
• Keep cats and dogs off that part of the garden for those three weeks
• Do not take the young in. Hand-rearing wild baby rabbits almost always fails, and in many places it is illegal without a licence
• For a garden damage problem, fence the vegetables rather than catching the rabbit — a two-foot wire fence with six inches buried and turned outward is the fix that holds
• Check local law before trapping. Relocating wildlife is prohibited in many jurisdictions, and wild rabbits are game species with seasons in some

What not to do

• Chase it. Capture myopathy — muscle breakdown from sustained panic — kills rabbits hours or days later with no injury at all. Bolting rabbits also find roads
• Grab it by the ears or the scruff. Painful, and it causes the thrashing that injures them
• Throw a blanket over it and gather it up. Works in films; in practice it panics the animal and you cannot control the legs
• Release a pet rabbit into the wild. They do not survive, and it spreads disease into the wild population
• Take a wild nestling indoors because it looks alone. It is not alone