Litter Training- still babies

FORUM

What are we about? Please read about our Forum Culture and check out the Rules.

BUNNY 911 – If your rabbit hasn’t eaten or pooped in 12-24 hours, call a vet immediately! Don’t have a vet? Check out VET RESOURCES

The subject of intentional breeding or meat rabbits is prohibited. The answers provided on this board are for general guideline purposes only. The information is not intended to diagnose or treat your pet. It is your responsibility to assess the information being given and seek professional advice/second opinion from your veterinarian and/or qualified behaviorist.

BINKYBUNNY FORUMS

This topic has 1sd reply, 2 voices, and was last updated 7 years, 1 month ago by Doodler.

Viewing 1 reply thread

Author

Messages
- 02/02/2019 at 3:37 PM
  AmberC
  Participant
  1 posts
  About two weeks ago we got our first ever bunnies upon doing LOTS of research, but clearly will always have lots to learn. Our Holland Lop is 10 weeks old and our Lionhead is 11 weeks old. The breeder we got them from said it would take about 2 weeks to litter train them, but upon lots of further research this seems to be wrong advice, correct? They pee in the litter box every time now, it seems, but still poop everywhere. They stay in an x pen most of the day except a few times of a day get about 10 minutes of supervised play. Should I not expect them to litter train until they can be neutered?
- 02/02/2019 at 7:41 PM
  Doodler
  Participant
  337 posts
  Unfortunately the information you were given is not usually correct. There are a couple things to consider. It’s not unusual for bunnies that age to pee in the box pretty regularly (although that’s not always the case either) but pooping out of the box is not unusual. A lot of times it does take them being neutered to help with the poop as this generally is marking behavior and it can be particularly bad when you have two bunnies in the same house. They will want to poop to claim it as their territory.
  
  Just to forewarn you it’s also not unusual before they are neutered for urine to also start landing outside of the box even if they are 100% urinating in the box now. Urine is also used for marking and they can even spray it. I was lucky because my first buck was really good with his box habits almost from the start. My does was really good with urine but she also pooped out of the box like crazy.
  
  Another thing to prepare for is once they are neutered, healed and hormones settled and you start prebonding and bonding they’ll probably lose their learned box habits but this should improve once they are bonded.
  
  This brings me to what else I wanted to mention. Please have them 100% separated at all times until you are ready to start prebonding. Soon their hormones will start really kicking in and they can fight very violently when this happens. They can even fight to the death so it’s very dangerous to have them stay together at this point.
Author

Messages

Viewing 1 reply thread

You must be logged in to reply to this topic.