Free Roaming bunnies

My little Fudge is my house bunny and lives in my room in a 2 storey NIC cage and gets the free roam of my room when im in and gets a pen added on for at night time but gets locked away when im not home.

I really want her to never have to get locked in her cage (although its big, not big enough personally) i cant make her cage bigger as i have used all the space i could.

Anyway how to you start letting them free roam without having holes in the walls and ripped up carpet. She doesnt chew anything but i feel if she had free roam she would start to.

She isnt neautered but will be getting done in spring nxt year. does anyone have an uneautered free roam rabbit??

Thanks:wave:

yep my JP has free run of the house....bedroom when im not home. he just goes in his cage over night to sleep. he got to the point where he's spraying everything and chewing wires....cant have him neutered for another couple of months though so for now i'l have to put up with clearing up and duct-taping wires!

I had to get some "cable tidy" from Poundland and cover all cables with it. I then covered the cable tidy with silver enfored duct tape and then smeared the cables with Vicks Menthol Rub which seems to have broken the habit but I still dont feel 100% safe and do still keep an eye on Lola. All bottoms of wallpaper have been stuck down with border adhesive and we have ensured there are no loose corners. To stop Lola chewing behind the sofa we got a rabbit play tunnel and put that along the length of the back of the sofa. You need eyes in your backside, there are things chewed that I never ever thought she would chew.

I think i've been lucky so far then, my rabbit jumps everywhere and gets into everything but he hasn't damaged anything yet, the only thing I have to watch around him is the rug, I'm sure once he hits his teenager stage he'll be a little monkey though!

I have had a house bunny since March and he is freerange 24/7 of the whole house, he hasn't chewed anything other than one cardboard box corner and poops/wee's in his litter tray and occassionally on the back door mat if my trainers smell of the other rabbits! He isn't neutered yet but im booking him in soon. I say give her a go and see how she fairs :wave:

my buns are newly bonded and both free roaming at all times, but both are neutered. I have 3 main problems

1) with wall paper! Anywhere the wall paper is loose, they tear it off. i have removed most of the wall paper under the bed which is where they mostly chew it. bitter sprays have made no difference to them eating it. It is rented flat and so will be putting up new wall paper over there before i leave!!!

2) since they have been bonded they are pooing outside of the litter cage to mark territory! (fortunately they only do it infront of the litter cage, and not entirely randomly) I don't seem to be able to stop this but am told they will go back to normal eventually...both used to have impecible litter habbits prior to bonding and post neutering. (Be warned, free roaming unneutered rabbits tend to territory mark with wee and poo. I had to have captain done as kept weeing on my bed)

3) Velvet likes to dig, and a certain patch of carpet near my wardrobe is thinning! I have put a digging box over it which seems to have cured this a little and built play crates out of storage boxes filled with hay and tea towel, this seems to have cured digging a bit also. I keep a large plastic sheet over my bed linnen when i am out so that she cannot dig in the bed!

EDIT: I have had my fair share of wire incidents in the past alos. keep all wires covered with heavy ovbjects, things they cannot move. if possible lead the wires under rugs or carpet so they don't know they are there!

Leanne said:

I have had a house bunny since March and he is freerange 24/7 of the whole house, he hasn't chewed anything other than one cardboard box corner and poops/wee's in his litter tray and occassionally on the back door mat if my trainers smell of the other rabbits! He isn't neutered yet but im booking him in soon. I say give her a go and see how she fairs :wave:

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you sound like you have a dream house bunny so far! :lol:

Captainsfluff said:

my buns are newly bonded and both free roaming at all times, but both are neutered. I have 3 main problems

1) with wall paper! Anywhere the wall paper is loose, they tear it off. i have removed most of the wall paper under the bed which is where they mostly chew it. bitter sprays have made no difference to them eating it. It is rented flat and so will be putting up new wall paper over there before i leave!!!

2) since they have been bonded they are pooing outside of the litter cage to mark territory! I don't seem to be able to stop this but am told they will go back to normal eventually...both used to have impecible litter habbits prior to bonding and post neutering. (Be warned, free roaming unneutered rabbits tend to territory mark with wee and poo. I had to have captain done as kept weeing on my bed)

3) Velvet likes to dig, and a certain patch of carpet near my wardrobe is thinning! I have put a digging box over it which seems to have cured this a little and built play crates out of storage boxes filled with hay and tea towel, this seems to have cured digging a bit also. I keep a large plastic sheet over my bed linnen when i am out so that she cannot dig in the bed!

Click to expand...

I was told to get "bitter apple" spray - erm NOPE!!! Lola loved it! I bought some of the "no more nails" and stuck all of the corner pieces of wallpaper down with that.

Lola has already ruined the carpet behind the sofa by digging a hole, which is now been made inpenetrable with a Quality Street tin which she hates!

~ Cat ~ said:

I was told to get "bitter apple" spray - erm NOPE!!! Lola loved it! I bought some of the "no more nails" and stuck all of the corner pieces of wallpaper down with that.

Lola has already ruined the carpet behind the sofa by digging a hole, which is now been made inpenetrable with a Quality Street tin which she hates!

Click to expand...

:lol: evil quality street tin, bane of lola's life! I got the pets@home bitter spray, it seems to have worked on the fabrics around the house, but just not the wall paper, they will not be deturred! Captain ate all the wall paper under the bed at my old house too. Little rascal!

Kermit has free roam of the living room when im at work, well he could really go anywhere in the house, but for some daft reason he wont go into the hall!

He only gets locked in his cage when im sleeping, although he doesnt really need to be in it to be honest he jumps in there to his litter tray and water when he needs it.

He doesnt chew things anymore (he did when he was a baby), i just leave loads pf willow toys and chews about and he has them.

Is your hallway slippy? Teddy took a while before he braved it, but he's fine now! Also I think he was a bit nervy of leaving 'his' room and running into a big open space! I make him a little obstacle course with tubes and boxes so that he could come out and still feel hidden, once he'd done it once he hopped all around it and now sleeps out in the hallway!

I get the Willow Balls etc but for some reason Lola is a wallpaper freak, she loves the stuff, even if it is emboassed she pulls the raised bit off. I can hear her doing it, "snip, snip, snippppppppp" and I move the chair and there she is sat behind it looking as if butter would not melt.

We covered the corners of carpets with cushions but she dug through the cushions. She has a lovely patch of garden to dig in, but oh no, cant dig in that cos she poos there!

Sometimes I feel its like having a new born baby, you need to have eyes in your bom and your wits about you.

Neo has free run of my place all the time too. I have covered cables behind tv but he doesn't really wreck anything. He loves going under the bed to sleep and i have flat cardboard boxes there since moving- he loves ripping them under the bed but that doesn't bother me too much. However he goes crazy at my parent's place ripping and eating the wallpaper and biting through wires:shock: We discovered he does it more when we lock him in the pen over night at their place. This time we left him out and he was fine. He's good as gold in his own house! :roll:

I let Honey have the run of the house, i put the big green tunnels behind both sattees & put cable tide on wires but she did bite the telephone wire lol
she had her litter tray with the hood on, plus a soft dog bed (she is in it in the pic) i also had 1 box with a bt book in the living room as the end of one of the tunnels plus an other one in the dinning room which she love to rip up lol
loads of toys which she just to carry every where, & a blanket in each room she loved to sleep on, but she never touched any thing in the house only the telephone wire, so what i am really saying, i lived in Honeys house :lol:
Honey had a lot of her things she loved all around & i think that kept her mind busy, oooh & she had willow all over the place to bite on lool.

mine also has run of the house, though he sticks with the downstairs in this house- though he'd come upstairs and push the bedroom door open in our old house when it was breakfast time or he got lonely!

he's been very understructive the past few years- in the early days when in my bedroom he had a nibble at a bedside cabinet, but has been brilliant since. He has successfully lived in peace with the broadband router (until a couple of months ago when he took a dislike to it flipped it over and ate the telephone cable, and then had a chew on the corner of the wall.) but thats 8 years of house bunny and thats all the damage I had. Thats not a lot worse than what one of the other buns did to the outside of the house!!

toys help though. He has a little bed (more of a cushion) which he loves to drag everywhere and dig on. I think that might help reduce the temptation to destruct!

Lucky likes to chew, but we wanted to let her have the whole hallway as her playroom.

We live it rented accomodation and after a few nibbles out of the skirting board and carpet, we've put a fence up around the room, just a little way from the walls, made up of nic cubes meshing.

Luckily, at the moment she hasn't realised that she could quite easily jump over the fence, but when she does we'll just build it 2 high