Flooring & Pooping in Bowl

[carolinel9]

I have two separate questions… First, for my flooring situation I currently have a thick garage-type mat covered with stick-on linoleum tiles. This setup seemed to have been working well until today I noticed a little bit of linoleum missing from the edges of a couple tiles, which is presumably from Peanut chewing. Definitely not great since I’m sure vinyl is very bad for him to ingest. Other than covering the flooring with blankets, towels, etc. (which is what I’m now doing), does anyone have other ideas for chew-proof flooring? I could probably get a bunch of cheap sheets that I could use to cover the vinyl and change out to wash every few days, but I feel like there must be a better solution.. The only other thing I can think of is buying heavy floor tiles (non-vinyl) that he hopefully wouldn’t be able to move. I’d like to avoid this because it’s probably not going to be cheap and I already have two different types of flooring going on… But if anyone has gone this route I’d love to hear how it has worked out for you.

My second issue is pooping in the food bowl. I keep Peanut’s food bowl in his large litter box (hay and food on one side, litter on the other side), because it has helped a ton with litter training. However, he loves to poop in it and occasionally pee in it. I constructed a kind of elevated food bowl by attaching a food bowl on top of an empty vase, which is attached to a piece of cardboard so that he can’t knock it over. I thought this had solved the issue but I came home to more poop in his bowl (I don’t even understand how he’s physically capable of doing this–the food bowl is significantly elevated). I also don’t think they’re cecal pellets, just fecal matter. Has anyone found a solution for this other than elevating the food bowl? I don’t know how much higher I can elevate it without preventing him from being able to eat from it. I’ve also seen various feeder setups that attach to wire pens, but he doesn’t really have a pen, just a fence that prevents him from leaving his area of my apartment.

Any suggestions are very very appreciated!!

[Serenity]

For the flooring, I used a tarp for a couple months while I figured out a more permanent solution. I put the tarp on the floor then set their cage on top of it and folded the edges over the outer corners of the cage and zip-tied them there (does that make any sense???). It took them a few months before they were able to start ripping this up but then I just flipped the tarp over (it was folded in half) and moved it so they couldn’t rip at it.
As for the food, you could definitely just get rid of the bowl altogether. Rabbit pellets have a LOT of sugar in them and it’s not good for them to have food all the time. An adult rabbit (depending on size and breed) only needs about a quarter cup of pellets a day. It’s not necessary for Peanut to have pellets all the time Just hay is fine. If you want to keep the pellets there (your choice, it’s not TOO big a deal if he has them all day, I know people who do it) then you could start gradually moving the bowl out of the litter box more every day until it’s not there at all. However, i do just suggest only giving him food once a day and if you want you could totally just scatter it around the floor for him to eat.
Hope this helped!

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