Lemon Oil

I don't usually let Walter in the bedroom.  I did when I first moved into my apartment, but then I discovered that Walter's lounging time under my bed was really time spent pulling up the wall-to-wall carpeting.  Figuring neither my landlord nor I would not like the carpeting to be ruined, I banned him from the bedroom.  Over the past weekend, however, I had some friends over for brunch.  Walter can be a pretty shy bunny, and I assumed he would want to be able to get away from the noise of company, so I allowed him to spend the afternoon in the bedroom, hiding under the bed.  Apparently he loved it, and now he can't get enough of playing in there.

For the past two days, the bedroom, as usual, has been off-limits to him.  Walter has spent much of the day staring longingly at the closed bedroom door, then scratching at both the floor and the door itself, and then eventually biting at the walls.  Of course, none of these things work, and all they do is manage to make me mad at the bunny.  This morning, Walter was particularly feisty.  So I had to resort to more clever methods than just turning him away from the door.  Enter, lemon oil.

I've used lemon oil on the door frames before, and it deters Walter from chewing things that he shouldn't.  Today, I decided to put some on the door and the floor mat in front of the bedroom door, in the hopes that the smell would be enough to keep Walter away from the entire area.  Sadly for Walter, this method worked.  Also sadly for Walter, I accidentally got some on his nose as I was waving my lemon oil-covered finger in front of his face.  He is still not pleased with me.

I bought a small (0.5 fluid ounce) bottle of Aura Cacia lemon oil from Whole Foods a while back.  I am sure I probably paid too much for it there, but you can find it online for about three bucks.  You only need a teeny tiny bit of lemon oil when applying it to door frames or wherever, so even a bottle as small as half a fluid ounce will last you a long time.

Using lemon oil as a chewing deterrent is something I definitely recommend.  It's been a huge help for me. I just put a tiny bit on my finger, then rub my finger across the door frame or the table leg or whatever else Walter likes to chew.  It's such a small amount that I can barely smell it, but it keeps Walter away for days or even weeks.  And, as I discovered today, using more than my usual amount can keep the rabbit away from an entire area! He hasn't gone anywhere near the bedroom door for the past hour.  (Though, that could also be because he's still mad at me for getting a dab of the lemon oil on his face.)

What do you recommend as a rabbit chewing deterrent?

Angry Rabbit

It has come to my attention that Walter hates when I sleep in on the weekends.  During the week, I wake up pretty early for work, and give the rabbit his breakfast by 7:30 AM.  On the weekends, Walter’s typical breakfast time isn’t until 10 AM or so.  Just like his mama, he gets grumpy when he’s hungry.

He also gets spiteful!  Despite hearing Walter jump back and forth in his cage all morning, I slept in on Saturday.  When I finally got out of bed, around 10:30 in the morning, I promptly let Walter out of the cage and fixed him his meal.  But the rabbit was already mad and punished me by acting absolutely crazy.

For starters, he began chewing on a doorframe that hasn’t interested him in weeks.  Then, he maniacally dug at the bathmats on the bathroom floor.  With great fury, he picked up an empty box and tossed it all over the bathroom.  I tolerated all this, simply picking up the bathmats and placing it out of his reach and turning him around when he started chewing the walls.  But then I hit my final straw: Walter started biting my foot.  Nonstop.

I was standing at the bathroom sink, drying my hair, and Walter crept slowly towards me.  At first, he tugged on my sweatpants.  I stopped what I was doing to give him a few forehead scratches and then returned to my task.  He started eating my sweatpants again.  I ignored him.  And then I felt the sharp pain of rabbit teeth on the top of my foot.  Ouch! I yelled at him to stop and moved him to the other side of the bathroom, but this just made him come back to bite me again.  Double ouch!

This went on for a few minutes, until I got so frustrated with him that I had to lock him back up in his cage.

Later in the day, he started huffing at me.  He’d already been fed.  I’d given him attention.  But still, he huffed.  So I finally huffed back.  He echoed my huff, and we went back and forth for a couple seconds until I got bored of acting like a bunny and went back to reading my book.

What does your rabbit do when he’s mad at you?

Rabbit Meets Dog: An Update

So Walter and I have been dog-sitting for a few days now, and I wish it was going better.  Friday morning, I arrived at my friend’s house to set the rabbit up in his temporary home.  I chose their guest bedroom, since it was close to where I’d be sleeping, and therefore easier for me to check in on him or spend time with him.  When I returned in the evening, my friend was still home and we decided to introduce Roxy and Walter.  This was a mistake.

Roxy, anxious about another animal in her home, had been crying and pacing in front of the door to the guest bedroom all day.  We opened the door slowly, holding onto Roxy’s collar in anticipation of an attack.  At first she just stared the rabbit down.  But then suddenly, she darted out of our grasp and towards Walter’s playpen, effectively nose-bumping with him rather hard.  We got a better grip on her, and after two more nose-bump incidents, decided that the introduction needed to be over.  I expected Walter to be startled – and maybe he was hiding his fear – but he just went about his business, hopping in the playpen.

But having to listen to the dog whine and sniff outside his door all day must’ve been terrifying to Walter.  Add to that the anger of having been caged up all day, and Walter turned into a menace.  Much later that evening, I found Walter’s playpen area a complete disaster – his travel crate had been completely overturned, his hay had been knocked everywhere, and the blanket covering the floor had been torn through in his attempts to dig his way out.

After a sleepless night of listening to Roxy cry nonstop (no exaggeration – she cried from midnight until 8 in the morning), it was time to move Walter somewhere less available to the dog.  I didn’t want to have to do this, but Walter had been banished to the unfinished basement.  I felt terribly about this.  But, with Paul’s help, Walter got situated in his second room for the weekend.  Again, he was angry, but at least Roxy couldn’t get to him this time.

Walter spent about twenty-four hours in the unfinished basement until I came to check on him yesterday afternoon and found that he had somehow escaped his playpen! I have no idea how he did it.  He didn’t break through the seam of the enclosure, he didn’t somehow sneak underneath the gate.  He must’ve hopped the fence! That’s a big jump for a little bunny.  I have no idea how long he was free for before I found him.  There are any number of ways for him to get hurt in that part of the basement.  It was time to move him again.

The only other option at this point was the finished part of the basement.  I didn’t want to do this – the basement is brand new, and between the potential for Walter to dig, chew, or urinate on the carpet, I didn’t want to risk ruining my friend’s brand new basement.  So I put him in the bathroom.  I think this is the most ideal place for Walter.  The floors and baseboards are all tile, and using the playpen, I blocked the wood vanity and the wood door frames, so there is nothing for him to chew.  He gets almost free range of the whole bathroom, so he has a little bit of room to run around.  And I know he loves the coolness of bathroom floor tiles.

He’s still not super happy, but as long as we can get through the next few days, I promise I’ll make it up to him with lots of out-of-cage time in our bunny-proofed home.

Ready, Aim, Fire!

My rabbit peed on my friend on Saturday night.

A friend from high school was in town for the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.  She came over on Saturday evening to catch up and just hang out.  Walter had been, for the most part, on pretty good behavior almost the entire day.

But something about my friend set off a series of bad bunny behaviors.  First, Walter started leaving droppings around the house on the carpet.  We’ve been living in the apartment for three weeks now, and this is the first time he’s done that.

Then, after telling my friend how well-behaved Walter had been lately, I decided to let him up on the couch for a few minutes.  This was a terrible decision.  I knew from the very moment Walter hopped up that something was not quite right.  He stood in the center of the couch, between my friend and me, and hopped in a few small circles.  Then he stopped, facing me.  The next thing I know, my friend shouts, “Oh no, WALTER!” And that’s when I see the urine stain spreading quickly on the side of her jeans and all over my couch cushion.

What was that all about?!  He hasn’t done that since he was a bitty baby bunny, and even then it was just one time.

I locked Walter up in his cage and he was grounded for the rest of the night.  The next day, he was right back to normal.  No attempts to hop on the couch, no accidents, nothing.  What is going on with my Walter boy?

Protecting TV Wires from Rabbit Teeth (and Vice-Versa!)

Walter is not my favorite this week.  I don’t know what’s gotten into him, but he seems to be on a mission to chew every doorframe, wire, and electrical cord in my apartment.  On top of that, his cage is smellier than usual, and I can’t get rid of the stink no matter how many times I change his litter box. I can’t imagine he enjoys the smell either.  Maybe that’s why he’s misbehaving.

At any rate, unpacking the apartment while there is a curious rabbit hopping around is tiresome and impossible.  Just as I start making progress, I have to stop what I’m doing to bunny-proof a new section of the apartment.  Needless to say, I haven’t gotten very far in setting up the new house.

One of the biggest trouble spots in my apartment is the entertainment center.  I have this great IKEA bookcase that I use as a TV stand/knickknack display, but it’s completely open.  This means that Walter is able to climb through the shelving to all the cords and cables for the TV, where he finds a delicious and dangerous snack.

IKEA Expedit Bookcase

What can I use to block him from accessing the TV cables?  I’d like something clear, for aesthetic purposes, that fits behind the bookcase so that Walter can still hop on the shelving if he wants, but can’t get to the wires.  Ideas?

Walter and the Couch

I have mentioned in several earlier posts that Walter’s favorite hangout is underneath the couch.  What I haven’t talked about yet is Walter’s love for the couch itself.

It took a while before we decided to let Walter up on the couch.  At first, he wasn’t big enough to make the jump, so we would stack pillows as little rabbit stairs.  This confused him at first, but he eventually got the hang of it.  As he grew, we took away his steps pillow-by-pillow until he could make the full jump on his own.

Once he’s up on the couch, he refuses to acknowledge it as a place to relax.  He prefers to be the sole occupier of the sofa, and likes to dart back and forth like a maniac.  He’ll toss his head or throw in some funky jumps in the middle of his races, but mostly he just enjoys running from one end of the couch to the other as quickly as he can.

Recent attempts by the rabbit have been made, with some success, to hop from the couch cushions to the top of the couch back.  If he’s made the jump, he’s not really quite sure what to do while up there, and you can tell the jump back down onto the seat is a little scary for him.

If Paul or I are sitting on the couch, the rabbit doesn’t let it faze him too much.  We’re simply two extra obstacles in his race course, and he’ll have a fun time jumping over us, on us, around us, or nudging us to get the heck off the couch.

Letting the rabbit on the couch is only problematic in two cases: when his nails scratch the leather or when he's decided it’s his new litter box.  Unfortunately, both things happen about ninety percent of the time that Walter is up on the couch. Trimming his nails would be a good start to fixing the first problem, if I could get the rabbit to hold still and be patient while I did it.  But the second problem seems much harder to fix.  He never urinates on the couch (okay, he did it once when he was younger), but he leaves droppings all the time!  Sometimes it’s just a typical “I’m marking my territory” dropping here or there, but sometimes it’s a full potty break!

I don't want to ban Walter from another of his favorite play places.  I'd prefer to find a way to share the couch with him.  Do you have any tips or tricks on getting a rabbit to stop using the couch as his second bathroom?

I've Gone to Carolina in My Mind..

Walter and I hit the road for North Carolina this weekend.  After I made him spend a total of eleven hours in the car, the rabbit did not care to be my friend for the majority of the weekend and he spent a lot of time sulking behind the bed in the hotel room.

This was my first time staying at a hotel with Walter, and it was not an experience I’d like to relive anytime soon.  For starters, Walter is an incredibly curious rabbit and will find his way behind every piece of furniture available to him.  At home, this isn’t a problem since everything has been rabbit-proofed.  In a hotel room, this leads to disaster.  Walter made his way behind the nightstand, which housed the power cords to a lamp and an alarm clock, the cord for the cable, and one other wire whose purpose I could not identify.

This meant that Walter had to be locked in the bathroom for most of the weekend, to avoid having my parents and I spend hours chasing him around the hotel room.  This displeased the rabbit, who punished us by trying to chew the waterline for the toilet and then refusing to go to the bathroom in his litter box all weekend.  He further showed his disgruntlement by snubbing me and any food I offered him.  But if food or forehead scratches were offered by my mother, he welcomed it.  Such a bratty bunny.

Thankfully, Walter got over it quickly when we finally got home on Sunday and we’re friends again.

During my drive down to North Carolina, the rabbit’s veterinarian called me with the results from Walter’s blood tests.  Most of the results were fine.  He tested lower than average in some areas, but the veterinarian cautioned me against worrying about these results just yet.  One really positive note is that Walter did not test positive for Pasteurella, which almost all bunnies have.  It’s amazing that he doesn’t have this bacterium.  On the downside, the veterinarian said that the rabbit tested “mildly positive” for E. Cuniculi.  This either means he had the infection in the past, or he is about to develop the infection further.

As a result, I have to be on high alert for Walter.  I’ve been instructed to watch for “absolutely anything abnormal,” which is stressful for me, since I think Walter’s a pretty abnormal animal already.  One of the key things to watch for is Walter’s water intake, to see if he’s drinking too much.  This is hard to do, since he uses a bowl and I can never tell if he’s consumed the water or if it’s just spilled out over the course of the day.  I will need to bring Walter back to the animal hospital in about a month to retest him for E. Cuniculi, or sooner if he starts behaving more abnormally than usual.

Things Ruined by Rabbit Teeth

I've decided to compile a list of all the things Walter has destroyed with his chompers.  This list does not include items that we’ve given to him as rabbit-approved chewthings.  I will update this list as it grows, which it will inevitably do.  Please feel free to leave your own list in the comments section.

• Over a dozen buttons on the remote control
• Wires to two surround-sound speakers
• Power cord to a laptop battery charger
• Approximately twenty inches’ worth of baseboard molding
• Six inches of doorframe molding
• A few inches of closet door wood slats
• One rubber stopper from a doorstop
• Several sections of a wicker basket
• Portions of the handle to my Longchamp bag
• Pieces of various shoes and flip-flops

The Bunny and the Bathroom

There are two rooms that are typically off-limits to Walter: the bedroom and the bathroom. We keep the bedroom door closed, since our bedroom also serves as our home office and there are just too many wires to keep out of Walter’s mouth. We keep Walter out of the bathroom for more entertaining reasons.

For a few weeks, we decided to expand Walter’s bunny-approved play area to include the bathroom. He loved the cool temperature of the floor tile, and it was another new space for him to run laps. (Aside from our living room rug, the whole apartment has hardwood flooring, which doesn’t give Walter a whole lot of traction while he runs: hilarious for us, annoying for him.)

For the most part, Walter’s experience in our bathroom was uneventful. He would spend the entire day there, simply lying behind the toilet. Every now and then, he’d get up to clean himself or venture out to use the litter box, but he was mostly content with having found a cool place to take a nap. So far, allowing our rabbit to hang out in the bathroom was going well, until one day when Walter was in a particularly adventurous mood.

Walter, napping next to the toilet.

Ever fearful that the rabbit would try to hop onto the toilet seat, but instead fall into the toilet, I was sure to keep the toilet lid closed. As I walked by the bathroom on this particular day, I noticed that Walter had hopped up onto the seat. Grateful that I remembered to close the lid, I didn’t notice Walter’s curious gaze at the bathroom counter.

Twenty minutes later, Paul and I heard a loud crash coming from the bathroom. We ran over to see what had happened and found all our countertop accessories now on the bathroom floor, alongside a broken ceramic toilet brush canister and a bunny giving us his best “I didn’t do it!” face.

I sat with Walter for the next half hour, trying to deter him from attempting his jump from the floor onto the counter again.

Later that afternoon, we found Walter sitting on the floor, surrounded by toilet paper. He had managed to start pulling the TP from the roll, and instead of breaking off from the roll, the never-ending ribbon of bathroom tissue formed a little fort around the rabbit. He couldn’t have been more pleased with himself.

These events weren’t enough to ban the bunny from the bathroom entirely. It wasn’t until Walter chewed off six inches of the doorway’s molding that we realized the extent of his bathroom mischief and had to kick him out of his favorite room completely.

Eating Baseboards: A Love/Hate Story

Walter loves to chew on our apartment’s baseboards. His appetite for baseboards is voracious. Paul’s and my enjoyment of fixing the walls every six weeks is not. We have tried all sorts of things to deter our rabbit from nibbling on the walls, to no avail.

We put down double-sided tape, so he would get annoyed with his whiskers getting stuck in the glue while chomping. Walter resolved this by simply eating the tape, too. (We quickly abandoned this strategy and removed all the tape.)

We bought an over-priced bottled of lemon oil, but haven’t used it yet out of sheer laziness and the fact that I no longer remember where I stored the bottle. I read mixed reviews about lemon oil: some sources say that putting it on the wood will deter the rabbit entirely; some say that the rabbit will enjoy the taste and thus chew more. The same goes with bitter apple spray, which we have not yet purchased.

We tried teaching Walter the word “no” by filling a spray bottle with water and spritzing him while shouting “NO!” every time he started gnawing. Walter was unfazed by the water and just noshed away.

I finally decided to ascribe to the old adage, “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” Walter wanted to chew a baseboard, so I’d give him his very own baseboard to chew. I debated the method for accomplishing this for a while, unsure about how to affix wood blocks to the wire sides of his cage. Fortunately, my coworker came up with a clever idea: Using cable ties to secure chunks of wood between the slotted sides.

I bought a pack of 10 white plastic cable ties, and a pack of 10 stainless steel ones, too. I wasn’t sure which ones to use at first: the stainless steel ones would ensure that Walter wouldn’t eat the cable tie, but the sharp edge could be dangerous and, as it turned out, they were hard to pull tightly enough around the wood blocks. I decided to use the plastic ones, and fortunately Walter's teeth hasn't come near them (yet).

I also spent a while pondering what to use for the wood blocks. I read many conflicting articles about rabbit-safe woods, until I finally settled on the majority opinion: untreated pine. After wandering aimlessly in the lumber section of Home Depot for half an hour, I stumbled upon a bin of pine wood shims. They were untreated, about eight inches long, and could be grouped together to make a block thick enough to satisfy Walter’s need to chew.

I got home and set to work. I made three “baseboards” that were four shims thick. One was placed at rabbit-mouth-level in front of his litter box, the other at rabbit-mouth-level if he chose to sit on top of his wooden bungalow, and the third was set vertically in the other corner of his litter box, in case Walter felt like getting creative while chewing.

My hope was that Walter would spend enough of his cage-time while we’re at work chewing on these rabbit-friendly baseboards, and then no longer have the urge to chew on our actual baseboards during out-of-cage time. And it worked! ..For about three days.

Six weeks later, Paul and I got out our wood filler and paint cans and set to work on the baseboards.

Walter and the Rabbit-Sitter

One of the meanest jokes that someone has played on me recently happened when I left Walter at my friend’s house for the weekend. We had only had Walter for two weeks before my boyfriend and I were scheduled to go away for a long weekend. Rather than torture Walter with a five-hour car ride to North Carolina, I searched for rabbit-friendly kennels with space for my bunny for a few days. This search proved unfruitful (though a few months later, I did find an appropriate kennel) and facing the possibility of cancelling our trip, decided to take a friend up on her offer to help.

Already a nervous new pet-owner, I was reluctant to put Walter in the care of a novice rabbit-sitter. On top of this, my friend owned a very curious and overly-friendly dog, and as such, Walter would be staying in her basement for the weekend. Of all the things to worry about, I most feared that he would be lonely down there by himself. (Why I thought he’d be more entertained at a kennel is beyond me.)

At any rate, this seemed to be my best option. The morning of our trip, I drove out to the ‘burbs to drop Walter off. Paul and I set up a little home-away-from-home for him. We had purchased a rabbit playpen that gave him about nine square feet of space and could serve as a cage when we traveled. Inside the playpen, we put his travel carrier as a hiding place, as well as his litter box, hay rack, food dishes, and toys. It was a pretty good set-up, considering it was just for the weekend – and despite having all those items inside the playpen, he still had ample room to romp around.

After bidding my bunny farewell and assuring him that we’d be back in a few days, Paul and I took off for Raleigh. I texted my friend to let her know where I had set Walter up, and asked her to text me back when she got home to let me know that the set up was in an okay place. Just as we hit the North Carolina border, I got a text message:

Amanda: Where’s Walter?

Me: I set him up in the basement, remember?

Amanda: I’m in the basement. Where is he?

Me [confused]: He’s right at the bottom of the stairs; you can’t miss his giant playpen!

Amanda: Yeah, I see all his stuff, but I don’t see him anywhere in there

Me [worried]: He’s probably hiding in his travel carrier.

Amanda: No, I checked. He wasn’t in there.

Me [really freaking out]: WTF??

As this transpired, I became more and more frantic. I immediately jumped to the worst-case scenario: Walter had escaped the cage, chewed some major electrical wires in the basement, and was lying behind the washing machine, dead as can be. Paul tried to alleviate my hysteria by telling me that Amanda was probably just kidding. “Who jokes about this?! She knows how nervous I am about Walter! What a horrible person!” I yelled back at him, panic-stricken. Worse than my overactive imagination was the fact that ten minutes had passed and Amanda hadn’t texted me back. I began plotting ways to convince Paul to turn the car around and head back home to search for Walter.

Until finally..

Amanda: Just kidding! He’s right here eating some hay. I gave him some food when I got home, too. Have a fun weekend!

..What a jerk!

Later in the weekend, Amanda sent me another message saying that she must’ve jinxed herself, because Walter did, in fact, escape from the cage. More than once. Apparently, he figured out that if he backed up against one side of the playpen and charged as fast as he could towards the seam of the enclosure, he could break through and hop to freedom. What a clever, mischievous bunny.