Chewing housing base - help please!

[smiledreamlove]

Miss Kuromi has always been quite active in chewing and scratching. I've learnt with sharing a room with a rabbit, one must put up with a lot of noise in the early hours of the morning when she wakes up, and have adapted - namely by removing noisy items at night - to this behaviour. Other than this, she's a pleasure to own and a great visitor to my side whenever she's out (she gets access to my room daily when supervised).

However, having made Romi's house larger, I decided to use cloroplast/signage boards that most people use for their bases. I used to have a wooden board as the base for her last house, but its not wide enough for the current setup. Boy was I excited! When my guinea pigs were inside, I always wanted to use one thinking "HA! perfect and they can't destroy this." -- That there is my darn problem.

Romi, having moved into her new setup, was excited to have all the space, but the new base intrigued her. As a rabbit who likes to chew and scratch, she set to work, and was frustrated to no ends that it wouldn't dent/rip when she scratched, and gnawing on it took great effort! At last I thought, "HAHAH, I've won!" Sadly that's not the case AT ALL. Kuromi is so determined that it is going to suffer by her mouth and feet that she's taken it into a GREAT hobby. It is her daily task! She wakes up - sets to work, naps for a bit, goes back to it, and so forth. This I thought meant she was bored... but she has wood chews, balls, rope chews, toilet rolls, gets bits of card to chew on and is fed high quality pellets & meadow hay. She gets a great life and is always binkying to show it. She also as I said above, gets to run around my room - which I have noticed stops the chewing a fair amount cos she loves to get out and explore!

The base is withstanding quite well still, at a month into use. I made it have sides to keep the spread of hay off my floor, but she's starting to chew the sides in triumph. I'm concerned if the signage is safe enough for her to chew - I assume it was as I know many use it with guinea pigs and indoor rabbits. I then thought about putting a polar fleece over it, but Romi is rather nasty to the poor blankets that aren't on her upstairs area, and digs at them and don't think they're going to be cost effective with having to replace them all the time!

Replacing the cloroplast isn't so much the issue than the result I have taken to, now sick of being woken at 3am for a brief stint, or between 5am-7am when she hears movement in the house from other animals/people, I've been locking her upstairs with water and hay at night and she is quiet then, but I have to wonder if that's too cruel? I just want to sleep but I don't want to harm her either. I should mention that after locking her consistently for three days, the next couple of days I tested if she had learnt she wasn't allowed to chew/scratch it... and she was quiet... so I thought I had taught my clever bunny well... but she has returned to it. I've hesitated to locking her up again, but this morning at 6am I had to - I'm very sick at the moment and not sleeping well - so I just got up and put her away for 2.5hrs until I woke up. I always let her out as soon as I'm awake too.

Please tell me your ideas, or whether its okay to have Miss Noisy Pants locked up... she does have room to move around up there - she's quite active! Thanks in advance!

 

[aurora369]

I have found that my rabbits will chew the coroplast bases for their NIC cages. They will start from the top edge and work their way down.

The only solution I have found is to make the base larger than the NIC cage so the lip sits outside the grids. However, this makes it a pain to clean because if anything spills you have to lift the grids out of the base.

An easier solution, but a more permanent commitment, is to make a plywood base. I made a box just like with coroplast out of plywood, glued linoleum to it and lined the upper edge with metal edging for drywall. The metal edging is bent 90 degrees down the length so I just placed it on the edge and put a couple screws in it to hold it in place.

You may be able to make a new coroplast base and use some metal stripping for carpet thresholds. Glue the metal strip to the top edge of the coroplast on the inside.

I have found that if the rabbit cannot chew on the top edge, they won't be abe to chew the base. Take a trip to your local hardware store and wander through the isles to find something that will work for you. Sometimes finding an experienced employee can really help you come up with some ideas as they are very familiar with the products and will have some ideas for you.

-Dawn

 

[Nancy McClelland]

:yeahthat:

 

[buster2369]

I have also recently been dealing with a similar problem. I put my rabbit Buster in my bedroom after I purchased a dog pen. He was previously sleeping in my bathroom. I always felt bad that he was locked up in there all night but I had no choice since I didn't have an area to put him in. He makes so much noise at night, like when he jumps onto his kennel cab and onto the newspaper which slides around. He is mostly loud from like 1-3 AM and again between 5-7 AM, it was starting to driving me nuts. I realized the only way I was going to be getting any sleep was to use a sound machine that plays white noise. It also seems to block the sound of him tearing up his phone book. (which of coarse is the only toy he likes to play with) If I keep it loud enough it helps me stay asleep and it has been keeping buster quieter in the morning when there's noise coming from other parts of the house...

Good luck with your noisy rabbit

 

[funnybunnymummy]

I don't think it hurts a rabbit to sleep in a different room at night. At our old house, Gus had his cage in the bathroom. At our new house, it's in the basement. He gets free run time from breakfast till bedtime and doesn't seem to be suffering for it.

Hope that helps!

Rue