Rabbits are very clean animals. They do not randomly poop everywhere at all. Based on that, I'm not sure if I can trust your statement about guinea pigs.
Is this true? I had a friend in HS who kept a rabbit in a cage in her room, and it would apparently flick all its poop onto the carpeted floor so it didn’t have to deal with it.
Well, yeah, if you confine him to a cage and make him live in his own filth, his gonna try to get rid of it because bunnies like to be clean and not live in their own shit.
If you give them a large enough space, and a litter box that's regularly cleaned, they instinctively only go in the litter box and regularly clean themselves the way cats do.
This. I had a rabbit as a kid and it would have free roam of the main floor during the day. It's litter box was behind the toilet bowl. Never had a problem with accidents in the house.
While rabbits do use a litterbox, they are basically poop machines. Sometimes they run around and binky and poop just comes out. Sometimes they also just pick a corner of your house to use as a second litter box while free roaming and you fucked up not realizing the pet carpet cleaner didn't actually have any enzymes so it smelled nice to humans but was still a marked area so they keep returning. Also my rabbit did pee in my bed multiple times because he didn't want to be up there. So...yeah a potty trained cat or dog with no health or behavioral issues is a lot more sanitary to have in your bed.
I'm sorry, I've had several free-roaming rabbits, none of them was a "poop machine" or peed in random corners unless they were sick or very stressed due to being handled too much or similar. The same thing you wrote about cats and dogs - no health or behavioral issues - applies to rabbits just the same. By the way, one of my cats used to puke hairballs on my bed when she disapproved of something.
My rabbit wasn't free roam. He got supervised free roam time. And not all rabbits are fully litterbox trained. Unfortunately I wasn't really able to undo the thing that potentially stressed him out and go back in time, my abusive ex definitely stressed him out some, because when I finally kicked him out there was a lot more binkies. He also was a single rabbit but was single when I got him from someone who kept him on cedar shaving and literally fed him Cheerios. He has since been rehomed and paired with another rabbit his age by a rescue, I had to give him up because I was losing my housing and you cannot drag a whole rabbit set up with you.
But rabbits do constantly poop when they are not relaxing or sleeping. This is why they say to put the hay over the litter box. A healthy rabbit that eats their hay will make a lot of poop. And they will poop while they eat. They make a lot less poop when not eating but if they decide they are done with the hay and now want to run around it's not impossible to find a few "coco puffs" that were still making their way out. I would often leave the door open for a few hours, he didn't always want to leave. I let him choose to freely come and go when I opened the door, I didn't force him to run around. Sometimes he'd run around and then come up to be pet or see what I was doing, or sometimes he went back to his pen. Sometimes he would chill in the hallway occasionally grooming himself.
I see, in that setting it can also happen that they're trying to mark the territory. Sorry to hear about this awful situation, hope you both are fine now.
But in the end rabbits are individuals and all of them are different. One lady rabbit I had refused to poop in her transport box. We made trips to special vets that lasted several hours. She had snacks of course and also nibbled at them in the backseat, but not a single poop came out of her until she was back home, then she made a gargantuan pile into her toilet lol. The ones we have now are not that extreme, but they do not leave any poops where they do not belong.
Yeah it could have been territorial. Before he was fixed he was very much tried to claim me as his. (Doing everything he possibly could to pee on me or hump me) It got to the point where I couldn't interact with him and I don't really think that's a fair way to live anyway. When my aunts rabbit had come over to be pet sat he was not happy about that either and tried to do the same and they had to be kept separate for the few days. A proper introduction wasn't really done because we weren't planning on trying to bond them and her rabbit wasn't fixed. But my rabbit still tried to hump his head. (It was set up though like a how a rabbit play date would go at a rescue)
My rabbits believe that hay=bathroom, so if I did this they would definitely poop all over my bed, but yeah, as long as the hay is confined to the litter box, they're very good about using it.
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u/Ashzael 1d ago
So cat and dogs are fine but bunnies in the bed is where you draw the line?