Why house rabbits need bunny proofing, Design for living

Design for living

The best way for you and your bunny to live harmoniously is share your home successfully.

Totally rethink

There are lots of things that will give you and your bunny hours of stress free enjoyment together and there are other things that will be of constant frustration to both of you. It's best to totally rethink your living environment by first understanding then changing the areas where your behaviour crosses over. If you can set up there areas of your home with you and your bunnies in mind you can avoid a great deal of issues caused by bad design.

Cats dogs and bunnies

An important thing to realise firstly is where as dogs and cats have been bred to develop characteristics that make is easy to live with humans, bunnies have been bred primarily for meat and fur, which means that when you adopt a bunny, you are adopting an animal with more wild instincts. Secondly unlike carnivorous, predatory animals like dogs or cats, bunnies evolved as a ground dwelling species and are the prey of almost all predators. Both these factors have a great impact on how bunnies interact in modern living environments.

Harmonious spaces

The way your rabbit sees the space you live in and the way you see it are very different. In your own home you instinctively feel safe and everything around you is designed for you to access, a rabbit on the other hand never let's down its guard and will always have an escape route planned. To this end your rabbit will spend a large part of its time exploring, maintaining and arranging its space around this need. If it can be moved it will be, if not given time it can be chewed through, curtains, furniture, door frames, tassels on sofas and cables behind the stereo. These need to be considered and respected from your bunnies point of view if they are to be shared successfully for the wellbeing and harmony of your self and you pet.

The edge of the room

By far the most important space to your bunny is the edge of the spaces you live in. Like the hedge rows of fields, these sheltered spaces will be adopted and maintained. It is important to appreciate the range of activities that take place there, the danger these areas can contain and the inappropriate types of damage that can occur to your furniture and electrical appliances that are typically put there. Bunnies constantly use this area keeping an eye on what's new and rearranging anything that disturbs the balance between obstacles that could prevent a speedy escape and things that provide advantageous cover. Anything that provides shelter is explored in detail until ways it can be moved through at various speeds and direction become well practised. It is important to make sure that anything placed in these areas are secure and cannot become a danger if a badly judged attempt to jump through, over or under it occurs. Anything that blocks smooth access through these areas will become the focus of unwelcome destructive behaviour. Any cables laying across the path, like new growth of plants, or dangle down like the roots into a burrow will be chewed back which is extremely dangerous if they are power cables. If a sofa protrudes into a room it may be worth pulling it away from the wall to allow your bunny to run behind it, this won't prevent the edges from becoming chewed but it will limit the damage or chances a hole in the frame could be made as your bunny could get stuck inside. Sofas made out of exposed metal frames can avoid a lot of this type of problem. If you have curtains or blinds that go to the floor you should think about have them taken up as they will become damaged.

Places to sit

Bunnies will typically find a place they like to sit under such as a set of shelves or along side something and this space becomes important to you. You should not expect then to sit in the middle of the room or next to you on a sofa as these places can feel too exposed for them, instead they will choose somewhere that they are the least exposed, that gives them a large aspect of vision into the room and that offers a easy escape from. If you block off access to all of these spaces you will ultimately leave them less relaxed when they are with you and more unlikely they will choose to sit along side you compared to when they are more relaxed.

Surfaces

Hard floor, although excellent for keeping clean, can prove tricky for bunnies especially older ones and you may find it makes them less willing to explore play and interact. If you have hard floors throw down some mats or buy some off cuts of wool carpet that can placed around your home so that they can get a good purchase when rounding corners or accelerating and stopping in corridor spaces.

Litter tray

Finding a place to put the litter tray is also important. Bunnies can be very fussy about this because as prey animals it has inherent dangers. It's best to let them decide which place is best for them and once they are trained to use a litter tray you can allow for this by place a few of them about your house in places you can live with, typically in the corner of a room and see which one they choose to use then remove the rest.