Odd digging behavior

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AnyaLyssa

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My Holland Lop buck, Dovahbit is about 6 months old, not neutered yet, and just started driving me absolutely nuts with his obsessive digging.

He has a HUGE enclosure, half of a bedroom, a digging box, and a litter box. But he ONLY digs at the plastic flooring under his igloo hide up on the second level of "caged" portion of his enclosure. The igloo is open on the bottom, it doesn't have any flooring itself. He gets inside, and will walk around under the igloo dragging it with him to scratch at different parts of the floor.

I took the hide away to see what would happen, and he stopped completely.
 
Hilarious! That's rabbits for ya, they're weird (and at times obsessive over the most inexplicable things). Totally normal behavior. If he's not damaging the flooring and digging seems to make him happy, my recommendation would be to give him his igloo back. Maybe he likes feeling sneaky, lol. Rabbits usually play by destroying or pretend-destroying things... digging, chewing, throwing stuff, etc. If he's found an outlet for potentially destructive behavior like digging that doesn't do any damage, then lucky you!

It's funny, today I saw our Harley Quinn digging at the coroplast flooring in the condo and she would alternate digging with scraping her teeth on the plastic like she was trying to chew it even though she totally wasn't able to get an angle on it to actually bite. All I could think was "I'm glad you're doing this here and not on our bedsheets for once."
 
I believe rabbits have an instinct to make a small divot in the ground where they want to relax, and it can take forever if the ground isn't moving, haha. If it's a place he likes, you may want to try putting a small blanket in there, that way his digs are more "productive" and he may be able to satisfy the need to dig with the blanket, rather than getting no digging satisfaction from the plastic floor.
 
I believe rabbits have an instinct to make a small divot in the ground where they want to relax, and it can take forever if the ground isn't moving, haha. If it's a place he likes, you may want to try putting a small blanket in there, that way his digs are more "productive" and he may be able to satisfy the need to dig with the blanket, rather than getting no digging satisfaction from the plastic floor.

While that does make sense, it doesn't explain why he's only digging under the igloo, while literally wearing the igloo like a turtle shell or armor as he moves from spot to spot.

*deploy battle mole* I'm tired, and that was way too funny in my head.....

But seriously, imagine this 6 pound lop, white with brown patches, under a purple see-through igloo: scratching furiously at a spot for a moment, then you hear knocking and scraping as the igloo is nudged into another spot a mere inches away, more furious scratching, rise and repeat, in a circle for hours on end....
 
The divot thing makes sense, but it definitely doesn't always seem to explain digging behavior! For example, Alice used to dig out her litter box and make a terrible mess. I put a second, EMPTY litter box in there and now she never digs the one with all the sawdust/wood pellets that would obviously feel more like digging in nature - she exclusively digs in the empty box. A lot. Seriously, it's her favorite past-time. She seems to specifically like the beveled corners of it, formed by the sides being angled outward slightly (which differs from the corners of her main box).
 

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