littertrained... sort of

[piperknitsRN]

I have two rabbits: Olive, a 10 month old Holland Lop spayed doe, and Simon, an 8-10 month old New Zealand mix neutered buck (he's only about four pounds, but looks like a New Zealand otherwise). I had Olive first, spayed her, waited a couple of months, and then adopted Simon from the local humane society. The bonding process took about two weeks.

Any way, both of them are, ostensibly, littertrained (though Simon wasn't when he first came to me, he trained in about two days! Olive pretty much trained herself as well). At least, all the pee goes in the litterbox (for which I count my blessings). Poo... well, that's a different story. Olive seems to be the worst about dropping pills/pellets (usually within about a foot of the litterbox; often she "hops and pops" as we jokingly call it--she'll jump out of the litterbox and a couple of poos will go flying onto the floor).

I doubt there's much that can be done about this except sweep up the poos, as they definitely get the concept of using the litterbox just fine... but I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts as to why the stray poops are occurring. Is it a territorial thing? Or do I just have lazy bunnies? (I should add when unsupervised, they live in an Xpen in the kitchen, and when supervised, they have the run of my bedroom and living room).

 

[Nancy McClelland]

We are happy that none of ours pees outside the litter box. The poo is the reason we own a shop vac. Have only had one out of 39 that would only pee and poo in a litter box. She was very neat and meticulous. More the exception than the rule.

 

[sanreay]

Hopper used the litter box once, we gave him a nice treat but that was that. We don't know what we are doing. I set the litter boxes up in his favorite corners and still when we let him out we have to constantly clean up after him. Not sure where to go with this.. thank you

 

[piperknitsRN]

Nancy McClelland wrote:

We are happy that none of ours pees outside the litter box. The poo is the reason we own a shop vac. Have only had one out of 39 that would only pee and poo in a litter box. She was very neat and meticulous. More the exception than the rule.

Well, I'm glad to know I'm not the only one with littertrained bunnies who leave stray pellets around. Simon is much better about being tidy than Olive is--funnily enough, *before* her spay, she always peed and pooed in the litter box. Then, she started getting a little lazy about always poo'ing in the litter box. I am happy that both of them pee in the litter box, though. The only time they made "mistakes" was during bonding, and that was due to territorial marking issues, I'm sure.