Bunny hates X-pen??

[xxrowie]

I have a 3 year old Netherland Dwarf bunny named Dexter, and (as much as I hate to admit it) up until now, he’s been a caged bunny. Several times a week he ran around in one of our upstairs bedrooms, but our downstairs area is too open & the times that we did let him out he just wanted to crawl under the lounges where he promptly got stuck – or go behind the TV cabinet. Anyway, we decided to buy an exercise pen last week & litter train him, in the hopes that then he could become a free roam bunny. He got the hang of litter training straight away – but he hates being in the pen! He’s constantly moving the edges & trying to push it up, and he has several different toys in there, yet he just keeps trying to get out. I know that it’s natural for bunnies to not want to be confined, but he’s in a bigger space than he was before & yet he just seems miserable.

We actually put his usual cage inside the pen, and he ran around exploring for a bit before settling down in his cage. Is it because he feels safer in there? I feel awful him being in his cage though because I know he needs exercise.

Also, he is getting desexed next week – it’s something we’ve never worried about before but he has sprayed in the past (and humped – we tried to get a guinea pig friend for him last year and ended up having to rehome him), so if we want to train him to be a house bunny I don’t want him spraying all over the place.

[Sophie, Lola, and Bailey]

Neutering should help with the spraying. It just sounds like he’s a little restless. One of my buns, Bailey, hates being in her x-pen. My buns have free roam of the apartment, but sometimes she has to go in there if we are staying with someone or in a hotel or something. She throws little tantrums, chewing on the wires. I think that giving Dexter some more exercise time might be a good idea.

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