What do you find hardest about owning rabbits?

[mouse_chalk]

naturestee wrote:

I'd have to say the poop/pee wars. Mocha and Oberon are horrible.:grumpy:

Oh yeah, the pee and poo wars are bad, too. Since my pairs unbonded our living room is just one big battleground, that seems to be constantly covered in bunny muck!


I do also kinf of miss having the space in our living room for another sofa, or dining table. If we didn't have the cages we could have that, and be able to entertain more. But, that just makes me think that we need a big huge house, rather than smaller cages or less bunnies Until then, my few and far between guests can sit on the floor with the bunny muck! :biggrin2:

 

[JadeIcing]

I would say keeping up with the brushing. Most of mine are heavy shedders.

 

[EileenH]

While I don't love having my couch peed on when I'm not looking, the only thing that I truly find a chore is all the hay. It seems that I have hay all over my house. And then when one of my cats eat some, I also have vomit with hay.

Other than that, I don't really mind any of it.

 

[Lover_Of_Lopz]

The hardest thing for me is.....Sleeping at night!!!!lol even if I only have one bunn(that stays in my room)she is only 1 yearand is up all night sometimes and she loves to keep mom up so she can get out and playI don't mind I LOVE to watch he do her binkys!!! mymom can get annoyed sometimes when bunn is loud so I try and let her play during the day a lot. Other wise she dose not chew on stuff and has good letterbox habits she will be better after she gets spayed hopefullyand I love my bunn more than any problems she has (to me she is perfect)and always will be:biggrin2:

--Nicky

 

[slavetoabunny]

Finding enough time to let everyone have enough exercise time. I have to have three separate playtimes.

 

[JadeIcing]

I wish.

slavetoabunny wrote:

Finding enough time to let everyone have enough exercise time. I have to have three separate playtimes.

 

[Bo B Bunny]

killertheturtle wrote:

a really crappy vacuum that clogs with hair/hay every 2 minutes, so vacuuming take an hour longer than it should.

ME TOO! and I have hard wood so I can sweep with a broom but the dust and stuff gets down in the cracks...... Luke has carpet in his room where Tony is. He uses hubby's shop vac. Tony loves it - he can binky all over and get a grooming - he likes being vacuumed! :shock:

 

[SnowyShiloh]

I was going to say living with the fear and uncertainty of their eventual deaths. But in a practical sense, I'd say picking up all the poop off the floor and dealing with them marking with urine! Phoebe Mae is like a little poop machine gun. I clean up every day, but she replaces them. The boys are guilty of this too. I worry about urine staining the carpet. My best friends are a tiny broom and dustpan, and the many bottles of Nature's Miracle I've gone through.

Storing hay is also a pain, we have it in giant tote boxes in the entryway and it's cold out there, hay always gets everywhere and it's darn scratchy too. A month or so ago I got some sort of bug bite on my hand while getting their hay, it puffed up and was itchy so now I'm paranoid about bugs.

 

[undergunfire]

I have a few complaints about owning bunnies, but I love them dearly and wouldn't trade it in.

* The hay! I have to order it offline, which costs me a lot of money. I hate the mess it makes and how the bunnies think it is okay to pull it out of their hay racks and into their litter boxes....to waste it.

* The litter boxes. I think if I redid their cages and made it easier to get their litter boxes out of their cages, then I wouldn't complain anymore. I don't half it, either, in the way of cleaning it out. Once a week I take out their litter boxes, dump them, wash them in the tub, dry them, then refill them. I should do it 2 times a week, but once a week is easier for me. I always wash them out each week because I don't want them to get build up.

* The play times. I wish I could bond all three of my boys, so they could play more. I don't give them enough play time as I should, mainly because it is hard to balance out the play times. Brody can't play inside the bunny room like Marlin and Morgan, I have to block off the hallway and let him loose out there to play because he pees on carpet (the hallways is tile). So, Brody really suffers the most with play time because the hallway gets traveled down a lot by us (Ryan, Garrett, and I)...so blocking the hallway a lot is not ideal.

 

[Elf Mommy]

Like so many others, the hardest thing for me is cleaning up her poops. She is in a high traffic area of the house (she gets much more attention that way), so it means everyone steps on them when she flings them out of the cage. To keep it from annoying the hubby, I have to be very vigilant!

 

[S_Toast]

Bo B Bunny wrote:

Good question! My emotional thing would be worrying about them but on the physical stuff:

Cleaning..... mine are messy! Hay everywhere! and Bo has his own way of litterboxing..... Pee in one and poo in the other.... *sigh*

 

Ha Ha my cat does the same thing. I hope Oaks doesn't develop the same habit or we will be over run with litter boxes at my house!

The hardest thing for me so far has been grooming. She wasn't kept up on at all before I got her so it's brush, brush, brush every day to try and slowly get her coat to normal. Oh and her nails were about 2 inches long!!! But she was very very good about letting me cut them. Probably because it hurt to hop before. Good thing Oaks is so patient with me!:biggrin2:

 

[BethM]

Hay and Cleaning are also my biggest difficulties.

The bunny pens are in the living room and second bedroom, but the only place to keep hay is in a corner of the dining room. So there are little hay trails between the hay box and the pens. Nick does try to help me clean those up, but he finds some of them not suitable for eating!

I usually clean cages once a week, and it's not really *hard,* but I am lazy and don't ever want to do it. I can do a quick clean in a few minutes, but it might take a good half hour to get it spotless.

Dealing with Nick when he's sick is also a trial, since he struggles and fights me so much. That's an occasional battle, though, while cleaning is constant.

 

[Raspberry82]

The funny thing in our house is that our 4 month old girl is less maintenance than our 4 year old boy .

1. Finding someone willing to look after them if we both need to go out of town for longer than a few days. Pet sitters are way too expensive! Curious what others do about this one!

2. Max hates being in a cage and is attention needy unless he's let out a lot. If I can't play with him or let him out enough daily, he'll pull and chew like crazy on his cage bars and loudly throw his toys all over throughout the night like a very spoiled little turd. Impossible to get him to stop and I worry he'll break his teeth!

3. Max sheds a TON for 2-3 months straight every winter, so it's a chore de-fuzzing all of my clothes if I pet him and keeping up with the scattered fuzz. He must have ambitions to be an angora or something, lol.

4. Minnie and Max are still unbonded (minnie is getting spayed this week thank gawd!) so space of 2 separated cages is a pain.

5. Working around pet-friendly apartments. We had a condo, but now have to move. So many don't allow 2 pets!

 

[Bo B Bunny]

The pet sitter thing is tough! We haven't been out of town for any length of time since we got Clover so we will have to arrange something when/if we do sometime. I think I'll see if my niece can come in to feed them. I should start a business!

I would hate to have to check on pets in apartments. I know they can be so awful!

Ha Ha my cat does the same thing. I hope Oaks doesn't develop the same habit or we will be over run with litter boxes at my house

Tony has 1, Clover has 1, Tank has 1, Diesel has 1, there is a community bunny pan in the play area, and Bo has TWO! :?

 

[mouse_chalk]

We really worried about that for ages and I would have said that was the most difficult thing before we found the solution. If we go away for just a couple of days, we're lucky my mum loves to come round and look after them- she knows their feeding schedule, she does a great job cleaning them out, and she even stays for over an hour to give them time to run about!

When it's for a week or so though it's too much for my poor mum to come round twice a day for a whole week- but we have found a petsitter that lives very locally who is also a trained veterinary nurse! She came round to meet the buns before, made lists of their food, wrote little descriptions of them next to their names so she could talk to them even! She loved the bunnies and even gave Chalk all her meds, and checked her stitches etc. She left notes for my mum when she came in the morning to say how they'd been eating, etc and took great care of them. It was kind of expensive at £9 a visit ($12) but well worth it for the peace of mind!

 

[slavetoabunny]

We are lucky to have a neighbor who is also a rabbit owner. He comes over twice a day to feed and clean. He sits and does his homework so the buns can get some exercise. We pay him $10 per day.

 

[Flash]

My hardest thing is letting Sophie get enough exercise since I have to gate an area from Flash.

I agree with having someone take care of my bunnies when I go away. I had my parents do it but now I live too far to have them come 2x a day.

I have a pet sitting business and I can't find anyone that knows enough to trust them so I have the same problem. I know other pet sitters that are great and would feed them etc but they wouldn't have any idea if someone is 'off'.

What I charge for bunnies a visit is $17, $20 if it's an apartment. Each area will differ according to price and I'm not the nearly the most expensive. Patti your getting a steal and lucky you to have someone close to care for the sexy rexy's.

 

[Sabine]

I am also lucky that I have a neighbour who owns six rabbits like me and she feeds them and gives them run time when we're away. We've never been away for more than a few days though. I worry a bit about cleaning the cages when we go away the weekend after next. I clean out the litter trays every day (and trust me they needed) and I am generous with litter. I ended up bying a surplus set of litter trays today which i will fill up and leave in the spare hutch so that she only has to swap them around after two days or so. Them beeing in dirty litter trays worries me most as I don't feel I can ask her to clean. She is doing us a favour and we never get to bunsit for her

 

[BethM]

I have taken two vacations since getting rabbits. The first, I went to San Francisco to visit a friend, but Jason stayed home so he was able to care for them.

The second time, we were getting married in Hawaii, so we had to board the bunnies. I was extremely unsure about leaving them with someone else, but it was fine. Our HRS has a couple people who will do boarding. The woman we left our bunnies with took extremely good care of them. The charge is $15/day per pair, and we were not charged for Tobi since she is a "foster." We did have to provide food, litter, and treats for our bunnies, as well as leave some cash to buy more if it was needed. All of the money goes to the HRS chapter, the sitters don't keep any of it. (We did bring some small gifts for them from our trip.)

 

[Bo B Bunny]

slavetoabunny wrote:

We are lucky to have a neighbor who is also a rabbit owner. He comes over twice a day to feed and clean. He sits and does his homework so the buns can get some exercise. We pay him $10 per day.

AWESOME! That's what I'll likely do for ours. We are usually gone just a couple of days and normally we can't all leave at one time anyhow. John manages to feed and water.