Curious about digging and biting behavior

[MoonMama]

Hello all,
My 9 month old female Holland lop digs at my clothes and tries to chew my clothes. Normal? She has done this for months whenever we interact.
Also, early this morning she was moving her litter box quite excitedly and digging at her cage bottom. Could this second behavior be related to weaning her babies and her babies being adopted out? Her last one left last weekend. He was 11 weeks old.
Relatedly, her baby, who left last weekend, bit his new owner a couple times while he was holding him. The new owner interacted with him many times before going there, and he even bit him twice before going home with him. This bun never bit me. Just wondering about advice for shaping behavior.
thanks for any input!

 

[Preitler]

Digging is normal rabbit behaviour, they don't do it constantly though. As far as my observations go there are different kinds of digging - hopping around and doing short burst is most common and is a marking behaviour, and sometimes they really get at it and build tunnels, do that intensly for weeks, then forget about for months or a year. In spring they prepare some nesting tunnels, and cover the entrance once it's long enough, well, some of them do. You can tell a buck from a doe by the way they dig, it's different.
Also, chewing and ripping stuff apart is also normal rabbit behaviour, tree branches sometimes can help to live out that urge. My Fury got a dedicated blanket for that.



Rabbits aren't fond of changes, so that the bucks bahaviour is somewhat different now is not surprising. Also puberty hits, big thing. And the hierachy he lived in dissolved, so he might try to make a point. There's nipping, which I consider a form of communication, or just having body parts in their blind spot, and biting in earnest.
Anyway, I would just ignore it and wait it out, I don't teach them that they can get what they want by biting, it's cuddly rabbits after all and not Jurassic Park .

 

[MoonMama]

Thank you so much for this reply! Very helpful!