A little “Home Improvement”

[MimzMum]

Well I just got a box from one of my Ebay finds and it was the one with all the Superpet shelves and ramps I ordered to give the buns a bit more ‘romping room’ when they are in their pens.

I don’t have piccies yet (camera died) but I’ll take some when it’s charged again. Mimzy has an extra shelf, ramp and a hay basket (as usual, they don’t like these) and Pip has had her first experience with a shelf and ramp and she took to it pretty quickly. She had some trouble getting down, because she’d try to brake at the bottom and the floor was too slick and she skidded into the litter box. (my poor baby!) So I put down two straw mats to help her get up and down without scooting all over the place, she likes it much better now.

I caught her nibbling on the ramp this morning though. Then I realized she wasn’t about to touch the hay in the basket and I had to put a pad of it on the floor for her. She went right for it and chowed it down. Poor thing, she doesn’t like to see her food in a cage! ^_^

And I got my Binky Box this week! ^_^ Pip didn’t waste any time tearing a hole in the bottom of the willow playhouse I ordered for her. *sigh* I’m going to have to grow my own willow trees up here and harvest, she goes through this stuff too fast! 0.o;

[RabbitPam]

Looking forward to your pix.

That reminds me of a question I’ve had for a while now. I have a cage with two platforms and it came with ramps to get from the bottom up to the first, then another from that to the second one on the other side. I’ve noticed that you guys have platforms without ramps. Do bunnies do alright without ramps to get up or do you need a minimum width for jumping, height requirements, traction, etc.? The bottom ramp always cuts the cage in the middle, even when pushed aside, and it doesn’t leave as much room for litter pans, food dishes and stretched out bunnies. I’d love to eliminate them but do not want a new bunny taking a tumble when it’s set up again. (I’ve seen that skidding problem.) I will upload a pix if you need it. Thanks.

Gee, MM. Maybe I should have made this another post? Sorry.

[Beka27]

i know how you feel about the willow… Mead goes thru it like there’s no tomorrow! i’m gonna need to start buying it in bulk… oh wait… i practically do already!

[MimzMum]

No problem, Pam, I think it’s a good place for this discussion. Thanks for bringing it up.
I personally would not, as you can see in the diagrams on the boxes, place the ramps so that they have to be reached one from the other, I don’t think that’s sturdy enough. I think this configuration is just for agile creatures like ferrets. So I do make sure that each ramp is a level at which the bunny can comfortably leap to and from, in case they are skittish of the ramp, knowing that if they were to hit too hard this could cause spinal or leg damage that may not be repairable.
Mimzy’s cage came with the ramp and shelf (which, btw, has a bunny’s head-sized hole for the sunken food dish that also came with it…which bothers me because I am always afraid he’ll hang himself on it when the bowl’s not there) and I just had to clip the ramp on and shove it to the far side, or back, of the cage so that he could scoot down it and leap up onto the shelf without it being in the way and cutting off the center of the pen. (Mimzy only uses the ramp for the down, never the up.) I put it up a little lower than the directions suggest, which I think, again, is mostly intended for ferrets who can leap to greater heights easier than bunnies.
Mimzy’s shelf is approximately six bars up on the cage in height. I figure that’s (eyeballing it) and 7-8 inches from the bottom of the cage. He manages it quite well and, we even watch him to see when he’s ready to get down and say things like, “Bunny go WHEEE!” and then he’ll dramatically slide down and turn around to face us for cheers and praise.
Even with the smallest of litterboxes (rectangular) I admit that there is then not much stopping room. But Mimzy has adapted to it and, of course for real exercise he goes out into the xpen which is all floor level. He also loves his shelf for sleeping on, and stretches full length with his face in the direction of where I sleep to watch me at night. Now that he has the extra shelf (with the ramp on the opposite wall from the other setup so it doesn’t cut off any more floor room) he actually prefers that one because it is closer to my face. If I put his plushie apple and carrot up there, he makes a big show of flinging and rolling them both down the ramp so that there is an unobstructed view of Mummy. ^_^ It’s quite funny actually.

Now with Pip, since her pen didn’t come with these accessories, I placed the new shelf (and none of these, btw, have the feeder bowl divit for some reason, but you can see the line drawn in it where the factory could ‘stamp’ it out if it was required to do so) on the same level as Mimzy’s, but I think today I will have to lower it a bar or two, because that really is too high for her. You can see when she gets up on it (which she did rather noisily several times last night) that she looks around with a bit of a phobic look in her eye that she’s so high up. She loves that it is a nice hiding spot underneath it, but navigating the shelf and ramp are proving to be a bit dicey for her. No worries, even if I lower it, the rest of her pen is quite roomy, even though it should be the same area as Mimzy’s, but for some reason looks bigger. But she also prefers to pop her binkies in the xpen and will be VERY cranky if she doesn’t get that regular time out in it. So I am very well trained in that regard. Her pen is very much her ‘hidey-spot’…not necessarily a place for running and jumping. This was why I was considering making them condos from NIC cubes because I was kind of disgusted at the initial size of these ‘super pens’. I am definitely going to need something bigger for the both of them if they ever bond well enough to share a room.

I don’t know if anything I said made it clear at all, and I apologize. I’ll be sure to get those piccies so you guys can see how the buns love their ‘perches’. Needless to say, I make very sure that whatever is in their cage only makes them comfortable and doesn’t endanger them in any way, especially if I have to be out for several hours and can’t watch them personally.

[MimzMum]

Here we go guys. Please excuse the double post and the crummy pix…best I could do.
Note that the positions of both bunnies indicate ‘disapproval pending’, since mommy attacked them with the flashy box again! >.<

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[RabbitPam]

Thanks, MM. The pix really help.
It seems that my set up will be fine, especially since I got into the habit of raising and lowering the platforms, depending on the age, size and mobility of Spockie over the years. He also stretched out on one (the upper) to get a good view of everything, and liked to eat his fresh food on the lower one. I had put the lower one so low that he could jump onto it easily, the pushed two ramps together to get to the next level with wide support. He could nap underneath the upper one. When he was a baby he just had one platform. (and he fit on it sideways! So tiny and cute.) He did all his running and binkies around my apartments.

I will ajust it if I get a smaller bunny.

Well, I have the cage and some brand new NIC cubes from Target along with some older ones in storage, along with toys, fresh litter pans, new water bottle…your bunnies would probably approve.

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