New Rabbit

[justalittlemad]

I recently got a female mini rex. She’s 10 weeks old. I’ve been trying to litter train her and can’t seem to get it. I read that they usually pick a corner, but not in her case. She seems to go everywhere, including her food dish. I try and clean up as soon as I see it and I have tried giving treats when she enters the litter box. I keep it clean and use pellets for the litter, as well as putting a little bit of timothy hay in it. The cage itself is 4 foot long by about 3 foot wide/high. I’ve read through some of the posts like this, but usually it’s that the cage is too small or they need to be spayed, which isn’t possible for me with her being so young. Basically, I need to know if this is something normal or ways to fix it. Because if she isn’t going to be able to be litter trained, not even to a point where she goes in one area, I won’t be able to keep her as much as I hate to say it. But from my understanding, it isn’t normal for them to not at least have one specific area they tend to use.

[Timber]

Welcome!
You don’t have bedding, litter, or hay outside of the litter box, do you?
Does she have access to hay outside the litter box? Mine has hay only in the litter box and since he eats a lot of it, he poos while eating.

I haven’t had this problem, but I wonder if you might have to put up with it until she’s old enough to be spayed.

[justalittlemad]

She has a hay feeder next to the litter box. Any bedding is on a second level in a little house, but she hasn’t been going up there. Just on the main level. She avoids the corner she sleeps in.

[Bam]

It does sound a little bit unusual. The fact that she avoids the corner she sleeps in is a good sign though, if she had an incontinence-problem due to a UTI, she’d not be able to avoid any place.

Bunnies mark their areas with poop and pee, this might subside when she feels more at home. She’s of course way too young to be spayed, so you’ll have to keep training her. Make sure the bedding in the litter-box is very different from the rest of her area. Pick up stray poops and put in the box. I hope she’ll get the hang of it. One of my buns did take quite a while to litter-train, but we got there. He wasn’t neutered at the time, I had him neutered a year later.

[justalittlemad]

I let her out when cleaning the cage and she leaves pellets behind, but she hasn’t peed outside of the cage. Which is the only reason j haven’t thought uti or something along those lines. I just find it baffling that she goes everywhere in the cage instead of in one spot. Are their any tricks that are shown to work if it is her marking her new territory? She’s my first rabbit. I got her from a local breeder and she’s used to being handled. But her last cage was outdoors. Could that make a difference?

[Azerane]

With territory marking you just have to give it time. You still need to sweep up the poops and dump them in the box, and wipe up pee messes with paper towel and put that in the box as well, but territorial marking is very different beahviourally from normal pee and poop so it just may take a little bit while she settles in to he new home. Some take to it very quickly, others take a quite a bit of time to get the hang of it. At 10 weeks she’s still pretty young as well. How big is her litter tray? Does she go in the box at all in addition to the other places, or does she only go outside the box?

Depending on the breeder’s set up, if her previous cage had a wire bottom which allowed all the pee and poop to fall through, it could be part of the issue. In that situation a rabbit can go wherever they like and there’s no territory marking, or repercussions of sitting in their own waste. The change in living situations and have moved completely may just be throwing her off. I’m sure she’ll come around.

[justalittlemad]

I want to say that the cage in the picture the breeder sent me was wire bottom. I didn’t consider that would even be an issue for her. As for the litter box, it’s the ones they sell in farm supply stores. It’s large enough for her to lay in comfortably. I haven’t physically seen her use it, but I know she has at least at night. Nobody had mentioned territory marking before I got her, so this has all been new to me if that’s the case. I thought that she wouldn’t have done that until she was closer to 6 months.

[Author]

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