Follow Friday – Doctors Foster and Smith

Posted on August 5, 2011 by Rabbittude

Click image for small animal section

One thing that was really hard for us early on was finding all the supplies we needed for Tigger and Shadow. Although we are in metro Atlanta, many of the good products for rabbits weren’t carried by any distributors in Georgia. We had to have nearly everything for them shipped in.

Ordering delivered direct had issues, like huge shipping costs. I was always scouting for the online store that was located the closest so that it would have the lowest UPS / FedEx / US postal shipping costs. It was frustrating at times to have the shipping be equal to or more than the items I needed. It was also tricky at times to balance the amount of shipping time needed versus when things were running out.

Doctors Foster and Smith have come along way in the ten years of Tigger and Shadow. At the start, they were mostly dog and cat. Now they have lots of small animal products and all the things ours love best like Oxbow products, Peter’s grass products, treats, toys and lots of other stuff.

Shipping has been $5.99 per order which is a dream and I see they have it listed on the site as free shipping for orders $49 dollars or more. They have a catered pet program. You call to sign up for regular delivery of products direct to your door. You create your menu which can be different items, quantities, and schedules. Every 10th shipment is on them!

I think it is time for me to order some pellets, hay, papaya tablets, treats and some grass mats! I think it is also time to get myself an organized shopping list and sign up for the catered pet program.

Simplify Your Life Week – Bungee & Alligator Images

Posted on August 5, 2011 by Rabbittude

Small bungee cord holding baby Shadow's water bottle

Alligator elastic clip holding adult Shadow's haybin

As promised yesterday, here are images of bungee cords and elastic alligator clips in use for bunnies. The last photo shows an outdoor resin storage bench that we had in the bunny room in our apartment. It stored stuff for them, but you can see they loved it too. We used some small rugs to make it a comfortable less slippery place for them to hang out. We held the rugs to the arm with elastic alligator sheet clips front and back and used giant metal paperclips to hold the arm rugs to the seat rug.

The bench backed up against a window and the bunnies loved to wiggle through the holes in the bench onto the window ledge which we had to cover with cardboard to protect it from teething. They would often take naps in the afternoon on the bench or the window ledge. We had a second floor apartment. I wondered if anyone looking up and seeing animals sleeping in the window ever realized it was rabbits and not cats.

I will have a follow friday suggestion later this evening.

Simplify Your Life Week – Bungees & Alligators

Posted on August 4, 2011 by Rabbittude

I can imagine the visual this title created. I am talking bungee cords for bunnies, but to keep things organized, not for bunny jumping stunts. I am also talking about bunnyproofing uses for the alligator clip elastic straps that are used to keep sheets in place on beds.

This has been a crazy day, so I haven’t had a chance to get photos of these in action. I will post a couple of images tomorrow. I first saw these baby bungee cords in action at our first vets office. These are just 3″ and 6″ in length and they were using them to hook around water bottles and hold them to the cages. I never realized that the home improvement store carried ones so small!

Most water bottles come with a metal hook to hold them to the cages, but I liked the idea of these bungee cords the minute I saw them. My family’s first bunny, Thumper, while in his cage would bounce his water bottle up and down until he unhooked the metal hook and his bottle would then fall off the cage. Fortunately for Thumper, someone was usually at home, otherwise he would have gone thirsty. So I loved the fact that the bungees would be something the bunnies could not disable while in their cages.

The larger bungee / the elastic sheet alligator clips work well to hold plastic hay bins onto the cages. The little clip-on plastic pieces built onto those have never work right for us. The hay bins would constantly be falling off without these bungees / sheet clips. We have also used the sheet clips to hold some rugs in place on outdoor plastic furniture we had giving the bunnies a slip proof surface to hop up on.

So anything you need to hold in place for the bunnies, these can help you out. They also serve as a chew toy for the bunnies from time to time. Occasionally one gets chewed through. It hasn’t happened too often though. I am assuming they got a bit of elastic snap that discouraged that particular chewing activity.

Simplify Your Life Week – Consider a Chairmat for Under a Cage

Posted on August 3, 2011 by Rabbittude

Carpet chairmat under cages

This fix for us was a bit pricier than others, but was a must do. Even though litter box trained, Mr. Shadow decided he liked to sleep in his litter box and prefered to keep it dry. So he started aiming outside his cage. We were both working outside the home at the time and didn’t fully realize this until we went to do a thorough cleaning of the room and moved the cages.

Even with cleaning, the carpet is badly stained and will have to be replaced. However, we found ourselves looking at a toss-up cost situation. Do we spend hundreds of dollars or more now to replace the carpet, or do we do something to protect it from further damage at this point?

In a tough economy, we opted for cleaning the carpet the best we could and then putting down a couple chairmats designed for carpeting under desks in offices. It was a bit pricier than some of the other fixes we have done for bunnies, but a lot less expensive than replacing the floor at this point.

This was a costly learning lesson. If we had put the chairmats down right from the start, the carpet would have been protected and our only cost would have been the chairmats. So, this one I pass along as one from the learn from our mistake category.

If you need to have rabbit cages in a room with wall-to-wall carpeting, even if the rabbits are litter box trained, they may spray. So it is good to have something down under the cage to protect the carpet. These chairmats are designed for carpet to help protect the pile of carpeting from being permanently crushed.

One negative is the price of them. You can get them in a number of rectangle sizes. We liked the ones that are a true rectangle, but price in our area ran $50 for one in the length we needed for the area and then we needed one for under each cage to get the full width. The second negative is that brand new these have a high odor. So we needed to put them in the garage until they lost the smell so so that we would not be causing breathing problems for either the rabbits or ourselves.

A positive now is that since these are really heavy-duty plastic, they are too hard for the rabbits to chew up or destroy. Also, they can be swept or wiped clean quite easily. I wish we had planned to have these right from the start, so that they were aired out and ready to go down right when we first moved into the house.

Simplify Your Life Week – Clips for Bunnies 2

Posted on August 2, 2011 by Rabbittude

Tigger & Shadow on top of their cages

Tigger made it quite clear as a baby that she intended to hop up on top of her cage. She would sit up on her hind legs as far as she could trying to see the top, which wasn’t at all possible since she was just two pounds and the cage top was 18 inches high. However, we knew Tigger, whether she could see it or not, she was going to go there. That presented a problem, because the spacing of the bars on the cage top was too wide for even a full-grown small rabbit to safely land, let alone a baby. We needed to do something fast to make it safe for whenever Tigger decided to make the leap.

At first we took a piece of cardboard cut to the size of the cage top and used ACCO binder clips to fasten the cardboard at the four corners to the top bars of the cage. Tigger made a safe but very slippery landing her first time hopping up there. So I hit the discount stores and found a small throw rug exactly the size needed. If I hadn’t, I would have cut a carpet remnant to size. We put the carpet on top of the cardboard and used giant 4″ metal paper clips to clip the carpet to the cardboard at the four corners.

Close up of the clips in action

That was a complete success on several fronts. It made the cage top safe for Tigger to hop up. Then when Shadow joined us two months later with his own cage, we fixed his the same. Since he could see her hopping up on top while she would free roam, he learned even more quickly than she did to hop up on top. They were kept safe from harm and it gave them an added space that they love, a bunny rabbit high ground to survey their territory. Since the cardboard and carpet are clipped on, it is very easy to take apart to clean cages, the carpets or replace the cardboard.

When they were younger they would just hop straight up and down from the cage top. Now that they have become senior buns that is a little bit too high. The cages are pushed up against a loveseat and the seat there is a few inches lower than their cage tops. So now they hop up on the loveseat and then hop over to the cage tops. In the future we may need to look at some pet steps if the loveseat begins to be too high.

For now everyone is happy with the bunny high ground.

Simplify Your Life Week – Clips for Bunnies

Posted on August 2, 2011 by Rabbittude

This post is about hitting the office products department to help with bunnyproofing and make your life with rabbits simpler. Both clips in the picture are 1 1/4 inches wide. The black ACCO binder clip is 2 inches long while the giant paper clip is 4 inches long.

How do we use these? These clips are great for holding cardboard together to make replaceable walls to keep bunny away from baseboards, furniture or doors you don’t want chewed. To see cardboard walls and pictures we created, here is a link back to an article I wrote at the end of June, The Great Wall of Cardboard.

A little bit later today, I will post some pictures showing how we used these clips, cardboard and carpet to both protect the bunnies and create a fun place to hang out.

Simplify Your Life Week – Drop Cloths for Bunnies

Posted on August 1, 2011 by Rabbittude

Carter's Waterproof Flannel Pads on Amazon.com

When Tigger and Shadow first came to us, they were babies with no litter box training. Tigger came first and we started her out in kitchen and bath areas that had linoleum floors. We temporarily put away our good throw rugs and invested in some inexpensive ones from discount stores that could be easily thrown in the wash for cleaning. We put several down to allow her run space. Still, it was a bit slippery for her.

Two months later Shadow came home. Tigger was litter box trained by then. We had both of them in side by side cages in a bedroom designated as theirs. This room was carpeted wall to wall. So to allow little Mr. Shadow run time while still being litter box trained, we needed a plan to protect the carpeting.

I do what has become a regular event over the years, I hit the discount stores and would walk up and down the aisles looking for any products that could be used for our needs. I found what I was looking for in the baby department, 100% flannel pads that were waterproof and machine washable. They had lap cloths, bassinet size and crib size. I pretty much bought out the store’s supply, creating a bunny layette. It turned out to be a very good investment.

The two crib sized “drop cloths” allowed coverage of all the open carpeted area if we put down two side by side. If we had Shadow up on a twin size bed, we could protect the bed with one crib sized pad or a couple of the bassinet sized ones. The smaller basinet and lap size pads could be used when holding him on our laps, for other small areas, or as a patchwork on the floor if the larger crib sized pads were in the wash.

After Tigger and Shadow were both litter box trained, I found a place to store the pads and held on to them. I had a feeling they were going to get more use. Prior to losing our third bunny Portia, she had a urinary tract infection. The vet wanted her to have a lot of free run time, but the infection meant she had lost her ability to make it to the litter box on time. So our drop cloths came back out and protected the rug in little Portia’s area.

After she recovered, a few pads needed to be replaced since she was quite messy and also had chewed some holes in some to vent her frustration while ill. We put the pads back into storage and they came out again this year when Tigger started having some bouts with stasis. The pads are helpful in my lap and over my shoulder as we medicate, feed her and give her extra water. We have found that things can be coming out of both ends of the rabbit when you have to do force feedings.

The waterproof flannel pads were a great purchase. Since they are designed with messy babies in mind and keeping things protected from baby accidents, they work extremely well for messy bunnies too. The clean up is great, just put them in the washer and dryer per instructions. Then they are ready again for the next round.

Ready, Set, Action …

Posted on July 31, 2011 by Rabbittude

Here is Miss Tigger up to her bunny armpits in hay

... and the action behind the camera

Earlier I promised I would share some bunny photos. The photo of Tigger was taken with my camera on its table top tripod taken to the floor to catch her at her level. While I was taking it, I felt a furious tugging. I quickly rotated the camera around on the tripod and got the shot of Shadow attacking the drawstring on my shorts.

I couldn’t see to focus this second shot. It was a quick swivel around and shoot blind by just pressing the button to capture the shot. But it gives a great view of what was going on in front of the camera and behind the camera at the same time. I would not have been able to get the shots of both Tigger and Shadow in action without my camera setup the way I showed in my earlier post on Catching Bunny Rabbit Photos .

Catching Bunny Rabbit Photos

Posted on July 31, 2011 by Rabbittude

This morning I am sharing how I get some of my up close and personal bunny rabbit photos. Above is a photo to show how I have my camera set up. I have put it up on my desk with a rabbit stand in who knows how to stand still.

When we first got Tigger and Shadow 10 years ago we used 35mm cameras. When digital cameras really started to drop in price, we made the switch, but found ourselves having to relearn picture-taking all over again. Taking photos of kids and rabbits is tough no matter the camera, because they rarely sit still. So we found ourselves with lots of blurred bunny photos.

Getting a camera that had a kids and pets setting was a big help, but I still found myself with lots of semi-blurred images. Two things recommended to decrease blur are using a tripod and automatic timer settings to snap the picture and remove the camera movement blur that can occur when depressing the button. Using a picture snapping timer setting rarely works for bunnies because they don’t stay still long enough for even a two second timer. Normal tripods usually put me way above bunny action and I would get lots of looking down on them shots.

I wanted shots to be more up close and personal. I tried just putting the camera on the floor, but that was really tough on me. I had to be flat on my stomach to see through the camera and focus. Then to get more than one shot, I had to completely rearrange myself into another position or angle if the bunnies had moved on to another place in the room. If they went to another room, I had to start over with my floor positioning. So I never got too many shots doing that.

When we started to sell things online in the Rabbittude Etsy shop, we purchased several table top camera tripods to aid in product photography photos. Looking at the one I have pictured here, I realized it was a good size to put on the floor and be bunny height. It allows me to kneel and still be able to see through the LCD to focus. The swivel ability of the tripod lets me easily follow the bunnies as they move around. I can catch multiple shots staying in one location.

Later this afternoon, I will share some bunny shots I got using this camera setup.

Dust Bunny Concerns

Posted on July 30, 2011 by Rabbittude

Dust Bunnies in the Rabbittude Etsy Shop

The Dust Bunnies are on alert in the Rabbittude Etsy Shop

Our dust bunnies have been sneaking out of their hiding places and reading recent posts about the Simplify Your Life Week due to start on Monday. They are deeply concerned that this is going to spur a move to serious cleaning, putting their very existence at risk.

They have gathered support and moved themselves up to the featured area on the Rabbittude Etsy shop in preparation for a major protest against any movement towards a clean sweep. We think the existence of the majority of the dust bunnies here is due to Tigger and Shadow. We fixed them so they couldn’t reproduce real rabbits. They have been showing us ever since that time that they still have a means to multiply and bring lots of little dust bunnies into our world.

Anytime I seek to sweep dust bunnies away, our dust bunny creators will interfere. I have started to picture all the little dust bunnies rising up in protest against me. I picture myself tied up someday in a fuzzy version of Gulliver’s Travels.

So I hope the dust bunnies will remain calm and reasoned this coming week. I will be talking about ways to keep things simple with rabbits in the house, but don’t have any major cleaning initiatives planned for them.

Follow Friday – Magic Happens Rabbit Rescue

Posted on July 29, 2011 by Rabbittude

5 Flavor Variety Pack - Home Baked Small Animal Treats by MHRR on Etsy

As I promised earlier, this one is for the Pooper Troopers aka bunny rabbits. Magic Happens Rabbit Rescue has a shop on Etsy, The Magic Happens Rabbit Rescue Store.

They have a number of tempting handmade treats for small animals. The picture here shows the five flavor variety pack which includes Mixed Berry Mint, Banana Cilantro, Pumpkin Spice, Carrot Parsley, and Apple Banana.

For humans, they have some lovely greeting cards and postcards. Actually the treats benefit the humans too, since happy bunnies make everybody happy!

MHRR store is a collective with members in different areas of the United States. So a multiple item purchase might ship from more than one location. The descriptions give full details.

Making a treat purchase from them is akin to adopted bunnies helping out rabbits still needing adoption to forever homes.

The Bunny Pootique

Posted on July 29, 2011 by Rabbittude

Wish I had thought of it! BFFs "Oopsie & Poopsie" - Bunny Poop Plush Set by Flat Bonnie on Etsy - Click image to goto item

Ten years with rabbits and it never occurred to me to actually do an internet search for bunny poop. Ah well, it is never too late to learn about new things.

Earlier this week, someone commented they thought someone on Etsy had bunny poo encased in metal for sale. True, as a pet memorial item. You send in the poo and she will encase it in Sterling Silver and create earrings. I have to admit that I have worn my bunnies’ poo, many times, but it was not intentional on my part. It isn’t among my fondest memories of them. So I will take a pass on this product. However, if this is of interest to you, you can find it on Etsy, search for “bunny poop”.

Earlier this week I did a comparison of bunny poop available from Ebay sellers. Etsy also has one seller of Rabbit Manure Fertilizer Green side dressing Gardening garden All Natural. That title obviously has some keyword stuffing and doesn’t read so well. They give the size as a US Postal Priority box of poop for $6.99 with $12.00 shipping cost. They say they stuff as much as possible into this box size which gives me a mental picture of a box about to pop with poop. They list a benefit of the rabbit manure, it doesn’t burn like some other manures. I can verify that should be true since our bunnies have never caught the house on fire with their poop even though we have gas heating and thus pilot lights and open cooking flames. The Etsy seller sounds quite friendly saying, “I look forward to shipping you some soon!”

Chocolate Bunny Poop Soap

The item in this picture was created for Easter and sold back then, but I’ll bet there could be more if you ask! You can click on the picture to see the full listing, except the selling price. I love the irony of bunny poop as soap and who doesn’t love a deep chocolate color and scent? This was created by Etsy seller Love Lee Soaps. It was intended as an Easter basket gag gift, but I think has a great year round potential for rabbit lovers.

Looking at things available on the web, I am a bit disturbed by how many items are gag candy gifts / treat bags made to look like they contain bunny poop. This kind of puts the gag into gag gift for me. It reminds me too much of an item from The Bad Bunny List. Someone left an open candy dish of Raisinets in the bunny area. I would never leave any open food in a bunny area being concerned about a bunny eating forbidden / dangerous foods. However in this case the bunny claimed them in a different manner, by pooping in the dish and marking it “theirs”. I could picture the next unsuspecting human not paying attention, grabbing a handful, tossing them into their mouth and really get a taste surprise.

On Amazon, bunny poop returns something cute for kids to aid in toilet training: Toilet Buddy Poo P. Bunny . Cute name, Poo P. Bunny! The product description says “Toilet Buddies are designed to open up family communication, peak children’s interest, and most importantly initiate toilet training readiness. They empower children to explore the toilet and bathroom independently with fun and humor.” And it gives your toilet a cartoon bunny rabbit ears, face, paws and carrot! The price is $17.59 and eligible for free shipping.

Part of the reason the Bunny Poo P. Bunny makes me smile is it really gives the feel of bunny is watching you. That reminds me of a story told to me by someone I met at a rescue group meeting. She would leave the bathroom door open and her bunny would come to the doorway, see she was occupied and race off to get into trouble while he knew she couldn’t get to him.

For today's necklace, Wood Bead is standing in and playing the role of Bunny Poo

I will admit, I did buy something this week that tickled my funny bone. It is upscaled and subtle enough to need a second look to “get” it if you don’t actually see a title. I bought this Bunny Poop necklace by foowahu on Etsy. I haven’t received it yet. The shop is in vacation mode right now. So if you like it you will have to check back in about a month to see if it is back in stock. I loved the necklace and the description: Watch your step! Those dang bunnies leave their little ‘presents’ everywhere!

And so they do and do and do… I will share something for the pooper troopers later.

*** Addendum, remembered after I posted. One internet search told me that one of the people search companies had located Bunny Poo for me. If I paid their fee, they would provide me with the real age, location, address and phone number for Bunny Poo.

Rabbittude

Rabbits + Attitude = Rabbittude

Tag Archives: rabbits