flooring

So if you've read my post in the "hopping mad" section you know my rabbits now have to move to the horse stable at my mom's house instead of the wood floored buildings I wanted to use. After talking things over we are thinking of moving one stall divider to the other side in order to split the double stall over there for the horses and give the bunnies a double stall opposite the aisle from the horses and between the tack room and hay section. This is the warmest, most dry location, and right next to an electrical outlet. We have an issue of what to do with the floor though. One 12x12 stall is just compressed crushed lime which I know rabbits can dig through and the other is covered in several inch thick stall mats. We cannot have digging and the edge of the barn sits near level with the floor with no concrete barrier around it like the other buildings. In fact several stalls on the other side have holes going directly outside in the back of the stalls from erosion on the hill behind or the rats we had several years back. What will it take to keep them in the building? I'm debating just covering the whole floor in chicken wire and throwing the bedding on top. That will make some difficulty cleaning in the spring since we can't scrape right down to the ag lime but it should stop all digging. Or do you think just putting a 2' strip along the back of the stalls (the front ends at the concrete aisle) would work?

Will they eat the mats if I put a whole lot of shavings and pine pellets over them with plenty of hay and other stuff to chew on? I have a couple pics of the mats that I'll upload when I get back. They are pretty heavy duty but we did have a rabbit years ago eat through some thinner interlocking mats. I'm also debating just moving the mats to another stall so the whole thing is level ag lime to roll chicken wire across the 24' length all as one piece. Those suckers are heavy though.

What are the stall mats made of? (Can't you tell I know nothing about horse care!) If they are rubber, I doubt the rabbits will chew them or try to dig through them. Lots of bedding on top should work.

They are some type of really dense rubber. I'm serious these things weigh a lot. We have them sliced in to 4 sections per stall and it still takes 2 sometimes 3 people to move one mat across the 12' aisle to another stall. One year we temporarily had a rabbit in a stall for someone else with thinner puzzle mats and it destroyed those but I'm not so sure about them doing much to these. However I also don't want them to bite off little chunks and swallow them seeing as I don't know the exact material they are made of. Some plastics and rubbers can have potentially toxic chemicals in them. I would bet on them not bothering the mats with enough bedding on top and other things to do but if a month or 2 from now they do decide to it's going to be a whole lot more work to get the mats out because of the bedding and I might put the stacked cages for the bucks there. I suppose it may come down to whether we actually can move them ourselves or not.

Mats are stinky, as I recall, when they are new, like tires. I would assume rabbits would find other things more interesting to chew. And it took restless horses with steel-shod hooves years to paw through, so I would think they would be fairly rabbit-proof as long as they have better alternatives (bedding, tunnels, etc.) to burrow in. I think I would risk it.

the mats should be just fine, there are folks up here who cut them into squares and use them for bunny rest pads.