Hello, I have a question about pregnant does close to their kindling date.
I currently have three pregnant does due to give birth tomorrow. Two of them are first-time moms; the other is proven but destroyed her last nest. On about day 28, I added in their nesting boxes, but it seems every time I check up on them the next day, they eat all of their nesting material. (Along with pooping and sleeping inside the nest box.) My question is how do I stop it? I feed my does plenty of hay and pellets, along with water. Do I put more food in for them? I never had this problem before, so I'm a little lost.
Some of my does want to have their nest, and eat it too.
I give them hay, and they build their nest, then eat it; I give them more hay, and they rebuild the nest, then eat it. It goes on until they finally have babies in the nest; still, they reach in and eat the hay! Fortunately, they do not pull the nest apart to do it.
I try to mitigate the situation with the most incorrigible nest-eaters by giving them straw instead of hay. Straw actually seems to make a better nest anyway, and they seem willing to mostly leave it alone and eat the hay I give them outside the box. The only drawback is that there seems to be a bit of a likelihood that straw can carry mites. Twice in the last few years I've had ear mites show up in the middle of the winter and I tied it back to the straw. The mites never seemed to bother the kits, it was just adults I found with the beginnings of an infestation. And ear mites are easily treated.
But using the nest box as a potty tray
is a problem. One way to deal with it is, as
@ladysown says, move it to a different spot in the cage. (When placing the box initially, make sure you know where the rabbit usually urinates and don't put the box there!) Sitting in the box and leaving a few poops is usually fine, but a potty tray won't do the job.
Sometimes does just have an issue with a particular box, and trading it out for a different one can do the trick. Also, it seems that if the box is roomy, the doe is more likely to sit in it, especially during the winter. For some of my does who are dedicated box-sitters, I give them a small box they they can
just get into and turn around. That seems to keep them from spending too much time in there.
Once in a while I'll have a doe that refuses every box I offer, and insists on building the nest on the wire beside the box. Since it's almost always too cold here to have bunnies born on the wire, my solution has been to literally fill the cage with boxes, leaving her no option but to build in one of them. Once the does chooses one and has the kits, I pull the rest of the boxes out. That has worked every time (admittedly there were only three or four times that happened).
