I also had a rabbit that liked to save her "hard poops". I have a hypothesis behind this.
Back in the days when I went on lots of nature hikes I would notice that wild rabbits in the US would put many of there poops in a single pile. I'm thinking that this behavior goes all the way back to when Domestic rabbits and US wild rabbits had a common ancestor.
A you probably know that rabbits make two types of poops, soft poops and hard poops. As a regular course of action rabbits re-eat there soft poops. Rabbits get as many vital nutrients from there soft poops as they do eating food the first time. In the wild, rabbit populations fluctuate from boom to bust. When food is plentifully wild rabbits multiply and when food is scarce those that are not eaten by predators die from starvation.
My hypothesis is, in the wild, rabbits save there hard poops as a hedge against possible starvation times in the future. This would be a hereditary/evolved trait, not a cognitively planed out strategy. If there were no food available, the rabbit could eat the hard poops that it had saved up. There would not be as many nutrients in the hard poops, but it would be better than eating nothing at all. I do not have any direct evidence to support this hypothesis. It would be a stretch of ethics `to preform a test on domestic rabbits.
My neighbor and I purchased our breeding female from someone that was getting out of raising meat rabbits. The previous owner worked with her husband to raise meat rabbits. The husband moved to a nursing home. The wife decided to stop "doing rabbits", the rabbits were kept on-site several months before being sold off cheep (instead of being dispatched). I am wondering if with just one person, the feeding was not as regular as it should have been.
When my neighbor and I first got our breeding female, she would always seem very eager when we put food in her dish. In her cage was a place where the poops did not fall through the hole. She seemed to poop there. When we would remove the poops the rabbit would seam to be agitated. Even more than other times we would do suff in the cage. It was then I thought my poop saving hypothesis.
If rabbits have genetic program in here head for poop saving, our rabbit's epperince could have triggered that programming. Her programming would be telling her, "Times are tough, you can save hard poops. If you don't get fed, you can eat your hard poops, and stave off hunger until your next feeding.". We kept her well fed (maybe too much), but once her programming was triggered it would not be shut off easily.
