Back onto soft ground first
Bring your Rex home in its carrier, place it in its own pen on the deep, soft bedding it knows, with hay, water, tray and hide in their usual positions, and walk away. A Rex returning from boarding needs to re-establish its territory, eat and rest, in that order, and handling can wait. Familiar smells and a normal layout settle rabbits far faster than attention does, so keep the household calm, keep other pets out, and let the first hours be deliberately uneventful.
Offer a favourite green by hand later in the day as a quiet greeting, and let your Rex choose whether free-roam happens that evening or the next day, judging by appetite and confidence in the pen.
The Rex-specific check: hocks after foreign floors
Boarding pens vary, and a Rex who has spent days on thinner bedding, mesh or harder flooring than home may come back with hocks under pressure. Once your rabbit is settled and eating, part the fur on both hocks and look carefully: thinning fur and pinkness call for deeper bedding and monitoring, while broken skin, swelling or reluctance to put weight down call for a vet. Rex coats also deserve a full stroke-through for dandruff, mites or sore patches, and the underside should be clean and dry.
Ask your boarder how much hay was eaten, whether droppings stayed normal, and whether your Rex moved willingly or sat in one corner — corner-sitting on a hard pen floor is often the story behind sore hocks.
Eating and droppings: the settling test
As with any rabbit home from boarding, confirm the gut has restarted: hay going in steadily, droppings plentiful and normal, water being taken. A Rex who has not eaten within a few hours of a calm homecoming, or who produces nothing, needs same-day veterinary advice. Brief pickiness that resolves by evening is common after a change of scene, especially if the boarding hay differed from home hay — another reason to send your own hay supply with your rabbit next time.
Weigh your Rex if you do so routinely, and compare with the pre-stay figure; a noticeable change over a short stay is information worth passing to your vet at the next visit.
Brief the whole household
Post-boarding care often involves several people — one collected the rabbit, another feeds in the morning, a third does the evening check. If the hock finding, the boarder's comments and the watch-fors live only in the collector's head, the morning feeder never hears them. Agree a short shared debrief on day one: condition found, what to watch, when the next hock check is due.
KinsLe Family Sharing keeps that Rex boarding debrief in the shared profile, so every family member works from the same notes until your rabbit is fully back to normal.