Log every session the same way
Bonding two rabbits takes weeks of short, supervised meetings, and memory blurs them into one hopeful impression. Give every session a fixed entry: the date, the start and end time, where the session happened, and who was present. Neutral territory matters to rabbits, so the location line is not decoration — note whether you used a bathroom, a pen on unfamiliar ground, or a room one rabbit considers his own, because the same pair can behave completely differently across those settings. Record how the session ended, too: calmly separated at a planned moment, finished early because of tension, or stopped because of a scuffle. A run of sessions all ending calmly at their planned length is real progress, and the log is the only way to see the run instead of remembering whichever session was most dramatic.
Score the behaviours you actually saw
Write behaviours, not verdicts. An entry that says it went badly is useless in week four; an entry that says she groomed his ears for a minute, he presented his head and was ignored, then both ate hay side by side tells you exactly where the pair stands. Note the milestones in order as they appear: tolerating the same space, eating near each other, one grooming the other, lying down relaxed in company, flopping. Note the hard behaviours with the same precision — chasing with contact, mounting that the other rabbit resents, fur pulling, circling, boxing, any bite. Beside each, record who initiated and who backed down, because a pair where one rabbit always presses and the other always yields needs different handling from a pair testing each other evenly.
Record setbacks with their trigger, not just the fight
Setbacks are data if you capture what surrounded them. When a session goes wrong, write down the minute it happened at, what changed just before — fresh greens put down between them, a favourite toy in the space, one rabbit cornered against the pen wall, a session that had already run twice as long as usual — and how you separated them. Patterns emerge within a fortnight: many pairs are fine until food appears, or fine for twenty minutes and quarrelsome when tired. Those patterns are instructions. Food-triggered scuffles mean scatter feeding at opposite ends or no food in early sessions; fatigue scuffles mean shorter sessions that end while things are still good. A setback written up this way shortens the road instead of resetting it.
Let the log decide the next step
Close each entry with one line: the decision. Sessions lengthen when the log shows relaxed behaviour at the current length; they stay short, or return to side-by-side living with scent swapping, when the log shows repeated tension. Note the in-between work too — swapped litter trays, exchanged blankets, time spent in each other's cleaned-out space — because bonding is built between sessions as much as inside them. If a bite draws blood or the same rabbit is repeatedly targeted, the log is your evidence for pausing and taking advice from an experienced rescue or your vet rather than pushing on. Stored in each rabbit's KinsLe Pet Passport, the finished log becomes part of the pair's shared history, proof of how the bond was built and a guide if they ever need re-bonding after time apart.