Bonded…sort of. Suggestions?

[ravishingRabbit]

I recently bonded our most recent adopt-e into our existing trio (the trio being 2 males and 1 female, along with the new addition being female). Our setup is they free-roam the house, but their main domain is our finished basement, as that’s where their litterboxes/castles/food/water etc is and where they tend to hang out more often than not despite having the rest of the house to roam. Before bonding Phoebe (our newest) had a sectioned off area of the basement to live in and they’d take turns having the rest of the house. The playdates all went exceptionally well really fast, taking place mostly neutral zone of the main bathroom (firstly just in the tub but after a couple dates in the whole bathroom including overnighting in there several times and eventually expanding to half of the house during the day), and now they’re kind of bonded…except only truly 100% when they’re in neutral territory. Ie when they’re in neutral territory it’s nothing but cuddles, mutual grooming and group flops all around, zero aggression whatsoever. This basically includes most of upstairs. But letting them go back to their main domain, ie the basement, it seems like they switch over to more of a general tolerance, and Abigail (my other female) and one of my males will nip at Phoebe on occasion if she’s too close by and chase her away. Not 100% of the time, but frequent enough that Phoebe now prefers to hang out on the other end of the room away from everyone else most of the time. We carpet-vacced the whole basement floor before them going back down there, and I wiped down their castles/houses etc to try and somewhat neutralize prior claim to these items in hopes that it would sort of make the area a little more neutral..but it doesn’t seem like that did anything other than make them give me dirty looks that they had to go around the entire place chinning everything again.

So my question is does anyone have any suggestions that might help here? They’re all so happy and lovey dovey together when they’re on neutral ground, so it sucks that they can’t just translate that into their home base. Silly rabbits being so territorial…

 

[Ruby n Max]

I think that everything you have done so far is outstanding! I like it that you have wiped down everything and that the bonding dates have gone well elsewhere in the house. I am wondering if they just need more time in the more neutral areas before moving back downstairs. It seems that they are mostly trusting of each other, but they just can’t help themselves down in the basement. Maybe you could try keeping them upstairs for a little while longer and only bring them downstairs for short periods of time, prolonging their play time down there as they start to get along better down there. Also try brining their toys and castles upstairs after a while to start integrating their territory into the neutral setting. This could help ease the process of territory issues.

You have pretty much done everything I would, so I think it just needs a little more time. Good luck!

[ravishingRabbit]

Thanks! 🙂 Yeah I did everything I could think of to try and make the transition as smooth as possible, and assumed perhaps with time maybe they’ll hopefully get better at hanging out down there. I was just curious if this was a problem anyone else had encountered and if they had any tips that I might not have thought of. I’ve been continuing to have them overnight in the bathroom to kind of “re-cement” their loving each other feelings the past couple nights and then just letting them roam the whole house during the day, hoping it will balance out or something since at night they wind up with many hours of peaceful happy together time, which hopefully reinforces that they do in fact like hanging out together. I’ll try adding some of their toys upstairs, but their main castle would be tricky to move though since it’s quite large, we converted our old coffee table into a big castle and built towers for it so it’s multistory, haha.

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