How to Properly Trap a Rabbit

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.

Rabbits, along with a wide range of other wild animals, carry with them a wide range of diseases, many of which can affect other animals, including livestock and domesticated pets, as well as humans — adults and children alike.



Tularemia, for example, is a bacterial disease that can also affect muskrats, hares, voles and beavers, that is easily spread. Transmission methods include handling an infected animal, dead or alive, as well as eating infected animals. If you catch and eat wild rabbits, there is a chance that you could ingest the bacteria that causes this disease. It is commonly recognized that you should always wear thick, protective gloves when handling wild animals, rabbits being no exception, and also making sure that hands and tools/equipment is washed and disinfected well, using antibacterial cleaning agents.

Now that you know about the rabbit-Tularemia connection, are wild rabbits really something that you would encourage your kids (or pets) to get close to? Would you want to get too close to them? That's what you must expect when you are looking at trapping rabbits, and even more so when you are looking to relocate the animal somewhere else afterwards. We don't recommend this, by the way. It's very rare that a relocated rabbit, or any other nuisance wild animal, will survive for long after they have been released into a territory they are not familiar with.

Constantly trapping and removing rabbits from your land will not be time or cost effective as a long-term result. If you have one problematic rabbit, this might work, although the animal is still likely to die after you have released it. If you have many problematic rabbits, on the other hand, looking at more permanent remedies is a smart decision. You will not to remove all of the plant life that is attracting the rabbits in closer, in the first place, and you will also need to look at erecting fences and installing other barriers. Scare tactics can also work, such as using wildlife eviction fluid, normally composed of the urine and other secretions from male predators — foxes and coyotes, for example.

Trapping, as a whole, will generally create more problems than it actually solves, especially if you have never trapped a rabbit before. You will need large enough traps to safely house the creature, and hares and certain species of wild rabbit can actually get much larger than you'd think.

You will need to check with your local authorities what the rules are on trapping, releasing, or killing rabbits, and you may find that it is illegal in some States to do one or all of those things. There are also other things to take into consideration too -- you may need permits to trap certain animals, and certain nuisance wildlife can only be trapped or killed at certain hunting periods of the year too. On top of that, there are even laws and regulations surrounding releasing the animal back into the wild again, if that is what you have chosen to do. We also recommend checking with local authorities what the rules are as far as that area of trapping is concerned too.

Read about How to Get Rid of Rabbits.
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.