Biting for no apparent reason!

[KytKattin]

 So I have been sitting on the floor in the evening and letting Nova run around my tiny dorm for increasingly longer times in the evening. Tonight we made it to 2 hours! She is very good (for now) about not chewing on any of my stuff. She will chin stuff, but that is about it. My problem is that as her confidence builds, she starts getting hyper. I will tap the floor and she will hop over. Sometimes I will be able to pet her on the nose/forehead, other times she will binky away (so cute!), or she will lunge towards my hand. That isn’t too much of a problem. I can just not pet her. My real problem is that she plays around my legs (I am super tall, there is a lot of leg!) and starts to nibble at them! I don’t want my legs to get bit! And she keeps coming back even after I shoo her away (which can induce any of the above things that happen when I try to pet her!). I will admit, I get jumpy and I am super sensitive. She does sometimes lick me and I even jump then because I am anticipating a bite. Should I just ignore her? When she bit the hardest tonight I jumped and (softly) gave a little yelp of suprise. This scared her enough that she went and hopped back into her cage and I shut the door, ending her free run for the night. I am worried that as her confidence builds here she is going to get more aggresive. How should I handle her behavior? I understand her cage aggresion, but outside the cage it can’t be tollerated. I would hate for one of my roomates to get bit if they ever wanted to hang out during her free roam time. 

Do I just layer up with socks and thick pants and ignore her behavior? Use a squirt bottle (don’t really want to go with this for this behavior)? Tell her “STOP” firmly (I don’t want to go with NO because that is the first two letters of her name!)? Give her something else to chew on (I don’t think this will work because she has pleanty of chews and ignores every single one of them!)? I want to nip this in the bud, no pun intended!

[Monkeybun]

I don’t think it’s aggression she is showing. It sounds more like grooming to me, with the tiny nibbles, the licks… just make the yelps when she nibbles and she will learn to not do it.

[mlg4491]

Some bunnies do bite to communicate. I recently fostered a rabbit who bit ALL the time. It was never hard enough to break the skin, it was just how she talked. She would nip if I wan’t petting her properly, if I didn’t set her food down fast enough, if I was in the way, if I wasn’t paying attention to her. This could be the way she talks, because I agree with Monkeybun that it doesn’t really sound aggressive. Making the yelps when she nibbles is good advice. We have one noise that we use when a bun has their mouth on something they shouldn’t, which isn’t so much a word just an “ah!” because “No” sounds awful close to “Zo”. When she lunges at you, is your hand right in front of her face? My bun used to do the lunging, until I figured out that if I just put my hand down to the side he was fine with it. So, my advice, is to layer up until you feel comfortable, and consistently interrupt the behavior.

[Sam and Lady's Human]

Lady can be a nipper, which is scary because she’s gonna be huge. Heck shes 9lbs now. So I watch her, and when she starts to do the diggy/nibble thing, I gently move her head away. Yelping works too sometimes, as well as whistling.

[KytKattin]

Yeah, she doesn’t seem aggressive when she is nibbling my legs. She is being aggressive when I try to pet her, though she has always been like that. She won’t let me pet her sides. She only accepts nose pets, if I reach for the side she runs away or turns around and really bites! Urgh, I need some NIC today, she is finally getting confident enough to climb over stuff to get to the corners I don’t want her in and while she has been good with her litterbox habits out in the open, I don’t trust her in hidden corners.

The fire alarm went off last night when I was at dinner. Oh boy was she upset! I don’t blame her, it is wretchedly loud. I was wondering if it was going to happen when I wasn’t in the room. I came into the room and her eyes were so wide I could see the whites, and she kept thumping. I gave her a papaya tablet, cleaned her litterbox, and let her run around and it seemed as though all was forgiven.

[Elrohwen]

It sounds like she’s playing or grooming when she goes for your legs. Since you said the yelp stopped her I would keep doing that – every nibble and you yelp.

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