For many (most?) buns, eating hay and going potty are synonymous. I wouldn’t really discourage this, b/c like you said, then they might start pottying somewhere else. Can their general feeding area for pellets/veggies be outside of the cage, and then the entire cage bottom be a litterbox/hay eating area? That’s a very small space to share betw/ 3 buns. If the whole bottom had litter in it, maybe you could fashion a suspended hay rack that went across the entire back wall of the cage. Another option would be to make an open-sided “cage” with linoleum to protect the floor and some NIC grids as the sides and back. You could feed pellets/veggies there and suspend water bottles off the grids.

Try it. If you can make some kind of temporary, inexpensive thing using materials you have on hand, just to see if it works, then later on you can replace it with something more durable. Have you tried attaching plastic baskets to the side of the cage so they can reach it, but not hop inside?

This is one of the issues I’ve noticed with people who have more than one bunny. Something might work PERFECTLY for little “Jimmy”, but “Janie” has no use for it. It gets even more complicated when you add a third, and “Freddy” is entirely different from the first two. It requires you to be a bit more creative, and go thru more trial and error to figure out what will work best for your buns and for your family.

I would not normally recommend grates or wire-bottom cages, but that is also something you may consider since it is only for feeding time and not for their primary residence.

Of course, MOST IMPORTANT thing is that they have hay.  It’s not always possible to have a perfect hay solution, but if that’s the only issue you have with your trio, consider yourself very lucky!

I’ve had their hay like this for a long time.  It is a small plastic container ($1 at a discount store) that I attach to the pen at an angle using a ziptie and dogclip.  They can’t get inside the container, but they can stand on their hind legs and forage in the hay.  My buns don’t respond well to hay that is inaccessible, so closed off hay racks don’t work for them.  But with this sytem, they can bury their faces in it and eat as much as they want.  It gets refilled once or twice a day. 

You can see the loose ziptie and dogclip in this pic a little bit better.

The key to the basket is that it is small enough that they are not going to climb in, but big enough so you don’t have to refill every hour. For a few buns, you might try two or three right next to each other and make a “wall” of hay baskets. Meadow did climb into this basket when I first set it up and she pooped and urinated in it. The nice thing about it being plastic is that I could disinfect it.

 Nice idea!! I  have a suet bird feeder zip tied at an angle to the side of the cage.

I would convert the cage into a litterbox for the 3. Though i see you are using tray liners(?) which would be super convenient! I was thinking you could just place litter and hay in the cage – maybe hay plonked in the middle, along with hay rack also. Or the plastic bin as Beka has done. Then place the sipper bottle with the spout coming to outside of cage. Maybe on the front near the doorway? Then place bowls for pellets/veg placed nearby the spout on the outside of cage. So it’s a defined hay/toileting zone and a water food zone.

If you still have the smaller wire door, you could use that to make a hay rack inside the cage, litter underneath. Attach old door to one wall, sort of create a V shape with cage wall and wire panel.

oh wow beka, thank you for posting that!! that is such a good idea!!

Thank you for the pics of the little baskets for hay…I really like that idea!  Willie had baskets he could chew on with hay, but lately he now sits in there and goes to potty too, so I removed it. I like that idea and I plan on doing that here in the next week or two! thanks so much!  

Since you have a trio, I recommend turning the cage into a large litterbox as suggested before.  The hay rack seems too small in my estimation, but then again, my rabbits tend to like everything large.  For my group of four I use two cages as their litterboxes, one grated one, and another one like yours.

Hay-peeing is actually a blessing because it enables you to make the rabbits pee wherever you want them to, by piling the hay there.

When I had a pair of rabbits, this setup worked below:

this is a grated cage

For four rabbits now I had to add a big tray underneath their litterbox in their exercise area because they dragged the hay across the carpet too much.

(their hay is on the tray as well)

the tray is very big, you could use a smaller one for easiy clean-up. I only had this big size. I can’t wash it but sweep and wipe it.

In their pen is where I have the larger cages for littering:

large one

smaller grated one

you want them to drink the water from outside the cage?

Oh, that’s up to you! It can be inside cage or not. My thinking was have water and food dishes in one place. Accesible outside the cage. You could have both really, one bottle inside the cage and one outside. What ever works best for your 3.

With the cage as litterbox, it just seems ideal size for 3 rabbits as a litter box. Sometimes they want to be on toilet at same time. I know with my two, if they were to hop into your cage, they would toilet next to the litterbox as well. To them it would just feel like one big litter box. Anything plastic and box like they would pee in pretty much! I was thinking something just like Petzy’s pictures. Keeping cage walls on & putting litter over entire cage floor.

aside: I have a hooded cat box for the rabbits in my living room behind a chair. Last night when I went to round up the pair, they ran behind there and Jersey jumped into the box to pee. I stuck my head back there & praised her as I’m trying to encourage her habits. I was really surprised when she jumped out and Rumball was in there too! lol. I didn’t think they could both fit in there! He jumped out and I expected to see that she’d peed on his head but he was lucky.

I didn’t have a box the right size. My litter guards are just cardboard panels wired to the cage. I took another set of photos for you to see.  I don’t know if you can buy organizer wire grids like we have them here, but they make a good size hay rack that might fit perfectly into your cage as well.

I actually wish I had a grid with bigger square openings. I like Beka’s hay basket because the rabbits don’t have to squeeze their noses through any bars. Most racks have too small of bars I find. My biggest rabbit tends to eat out of my grid rack from the open side on the right.

I would not put any attachable bowls or bottles on the inside of your litter cage. I used to do it but found the bunnies bump into these accesories when parking themselves in the corners to pee.

Petzy, that grid looks like the normal side everyone uses for condos…but didn’t they start making grid panels with larger squares? Was a pain for condo builders but might be option for hay rack grid.
Your hay rack /litter box set-ups look great!

“Karla”, were the rabbits peeing in or near the feed bowls when you gave them outside of the cage also?

Thanks Jersey. I have not seen the grids with larger squares here but I only really need one grid, LOL! (anyone want to sell 1 grid to me? anyone at all?)

From what you’re saying… that they’re not peeing in the veggies but only in the hay… I think they already view that cage as one giant litterbox. The only issue is that… YOU don’t realize that the cage is one big litterbox…. lol! They know something that you don’t know. Smart bunnies! Let us know how that works out for you, and more pics would be great! For 3 bunnies, you need a larger litter area so there is no competition over the toilet, and it’ll be less work for you. With my two litterboxes, I clean them both out 2 or 3 times a week and that’s it. It would be more work if I had one small litterbox that I had to clean daily. And with buns, the more opportunity you give them to be “right” (more room to potty) the fewer problems you’ll have.

As far as the water bottle, I like having mine over the litterbox.  One time I didn’t screw the cap on all the way when I changed it and it drained out all over the floor.  So if it’s positioned over the box, at least if it leaks, the only thing that gets wet is the litter.

for a hay rack that i made i took a folder organizer and fastened it to the outside of the dog crate and the bars of the crate serve as the openings nd i can easily fill it without having to open the crate.

I would make the hay rack much larger, and while you are retraining them put some hay on the floor of the cage too. Another trick to teach them to use the cage as a litterbox is by taking the wire top off for a few days until they like using it and then transitioning them from cage bottom to assembled cage.