HELP!! BOTH does suddenly digging out their pellets!!

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That sounds good! Can I be your girlfriend and come over for dinner too????? LOL

The kit soup... well I don't like those tiny bones.
 
dayna":gjwinjlb said:
That sounds good! Can I be your girlfriend and come over for dinner too????? LOL

The kit soup... well I don't like those tiny bones.
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Trust me - best mashed potatoes any of us have eaten in our lives - decadent!

As for the kit soup - that's why you use the bones to make the stock first, then remove them and throw them in the worm bed. :D Well, once we actually have worms in there - we need more bunny berries first!
 
I used to add treats to my girls' food bowls- cue the digging! Now, I give them treats either directly, or I put them in a separate empty tuna can. They now associate treats with the can and not their food bowl. Maybe something like that might help.

*fingers crossed for healthy kits soon*
 
I have a young buck that bites his feeder to shake it .... always a pile of pellets under his cage.

I'd send him to the freezer camp but he's the last of his line that I have (gave his mother back to the original owner) and want to keep her lines as she was a great rabbit. Hope he stops this or I'll send him to the freezer camp after he produces a litter.
 
Marinea":2eecls3m said:
I used to add treats to my girls' food bowls- cue the digging! Now, I give them treats either directly, or I put them in a separate empty tuna can. They now associate treats with the can and not their food bowl. Maybe something like that might help.

*fingers crossed for healthy kits soon*
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We have never put any treats in their feeder, so that's definitely not the cause of digging in the pellets. We've had these rabbits since March 1st and they have never dug in their pellets until sometime in the past week or so.

Actually we don't really give treats - just their herbs and now their grain mix as their feed increase for the final week of pregnancy, and we have always used a separate little dish for those. I'm 99% sure that their previous owner never even fed them treats - she seemed very much about being hands off and not getting attached and fed just pellets and what looked to be a very small amount of hay. <br /><br /> __________ Tue May 13, 2014 5:44 pm __________ <br /><br />
Ramjet":2eecls3m said:
I have a young buck that bites his feeder to shake it .... always a pile of pellets under his cage.

I'd send him to the freezer camp but he's the last of his line that I have (gave his mother back to the original owner) and want to keep her lines as she was a great rabbit. Hope he stops this or I'll send him to the freezer camp after he produces a litter.
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That seems very odd! We have the Bass feeders that are flush mounted to the cages, not the J feeders. There's actually no way for them to shake the feeder as it's 100% outside of the cage.
 
Oh, the waste! It drives me nuts! My solution is to have a catchment system under the feeder. I have my rabbits on wire so the catchment goes under the wire where they can't get at it. Then once a day I pour what is in the catchment back into the feeder.
 
Comet007":1gwvvua4 said:
There's actually no way for them to shake the feeder as it's 100% outside of the cage.
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Au contraire, Comet. They just haven't figured that trick out yet. One of my does shakes the feeder by either grabbing the bottom lip where the opening to the feed hopper is, or if she is really ticked off she stands and grabs the top through the cage wire.

My rabbits are all on free feed now (yes, even bucks and dry does), so she no longer does it since she has food all of the time.
 
MamaSheepdog":33oipotb said:
Comet007":33oipotb said:
There's actually no way for them to shake the feeder as it's 100% outside of the cage.
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Au contraire, Comet. They just haven't figured that trick out yet. One of my does shakes the feeder by either grabbing the bottom lip where the opening to the feed hopper is, or if she is really ticked off she stands and grabs the top through the cage wire.

My rabbits are all on free feed now (yes, even bucks and dry does), so she no longer does it since she has food all of the time.
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Which makes me wonder once again - don't they know they are edible? :p
 
Schipperkesue":25dq6qny said:
Oh, the waste! It drives me nuts! My solution is to have a catchment system under the feeder. I have my rabbits on wire so the catchment goes under the wire where they can't get at it. Then once a day I pour what is in the catchment back into the feeder.
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The waste kills me - and the girls are still doing it! Two nights ago we gave them a little mountain of hay - they ate probably 70% of it and the rest got put down in the nest box, just laying flat, no nests built and they still dug out more pellets. Do you have any pictures of your system? I'm most even sure where to start, but it seems that I need to come up with something.
 
Comet007":2al2tt0e said:
Which makes me wonder once again - don't they know they are edible? :p
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Yours know they are safe for a while yet. ;) You wouldn't want to eat them before you have replacements, would you?
 
Haha, no, they are safe for a time at least! I really hope that once they have the kits they will stop the digging - I'm hoping that they are just having the instinct to dig because they are approaching their due date. None of these buns ever wasted any pellets before. We will be putting in the cardboard liners today, and I'm trying to figure out what we might give them for nesting material, or if we will still be ok with the hay and they will stop this nonsense once they kindle. On the positive side, neither doe is using the area as a bathroom so that's something at least!

I noticed last night that there were some fresh cecals under both of their cages that they didn't eat - do they have trouble reaching them as they get further along in the pregnancy? I'm 98% sure they are pregnant - both of them have bellies that look much different before. When they stretch out we can see that they're not slim like before.
 
Comet007":blbyn0cs said:
Schipperkesue":blbyn0cs said:
Oh, the waste! It drives me nuts! My solution is to have a catchment system under the feeder. I have my rabbits on wire so the catchment goes under the wire where they can't get at it. Then once a day I pour what is in the catchment back into the feeder.
Click to expand...

The waste kills me - and the girls are still doing it! Two nights ago we gave them a little mountain of hay - they ate probably 70% of it and the rest got put down in the nest box, just laying flat, no nests built and they still dug out more pellets. Do you have any pictures of your system? I'm most even sure where to start, but it seems that I need to come up with something.
Click to expand...


I buy a plastic dish pan from the dollar store, drill holes in all four corners at the top, use 's' hooks to suspend it from the cage bottom under the j-feeder. I adjust it to the most effective place. The buns all pee and poop in the back corners and the feeder is in the front so I don't catch waste by mistake.
 
Ah, wonderful, thank you! Sounds simple enough and I already have plenty of various sized plastic bins and we have S hooks, so hopefully we can do something simple enough tonight. Day 28 - really getting excited now!
 

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