While Rabbit is a sweet, fluffy and social animal that many people really interested to keep them as a pet. But please pay attention because rabbit is classified as high maintenance cost pet along with dog and cat. I will highly advise you to not buy a rabbit as a pet on impulsive emotion. Please check this “7 Important Facts of Rabbits Before You Decide to Pet Them” article before you decide to pet them so you will not become an irresponsible rabbit pet owner.
One of the added reason, pet rabbit is quite delicate and sensitive to cleanliness. While being sensitive toward cleanliness, rabbit prone to get dirty and messy. Their urine is really smelly because it contains ammonia which often because of their cage smelly. Neglecting to keep clean the rabbit cage and let the cage become smelly will make your pet rabbit also become smelly possibly get depressed and sick.
Cleaning a rabbit cage can become a taxing chore. But doing it regularly by will make the job less much of a chore. It’s recommended doing a small cleaning every day in order to not pile the things you have to clean as you clean the rabbit cage. It is also recommended to do thorough clean depend on how big is the rabbit cage and how many rabbits you have kept as the pet for every weeks or month.
Here is some bit more pointer regarding how to keep your rabbit cage from stinking.
1. Clean Any Leftover Food
Despite rabbit is a glutton creature, sometimes your pet left some food leftover that stays in its dish or just spread in its surrounding cage. Clean that leftover food and replace it with fresh and refilled food every day for your rabbit. By cleaning the leftover food, you will protect your pet rabbit from any bacteria that possibly thrive within the leftover food. For at least once a week, it is recommended to clean the food dish and water bottle (or water dish) with hot water and soap to keep its hygiene.
- When cleaning the food dish, don’t forget to clean in detail, make sure the bits of the leftover like a stale bit of dry food or wilting greens are thoroughly gone when scrubbing it. It will make sure the rabbit won’t try to eat it and be harmed.
- Don’t wait for a week if you find your rabbit food dish get dirty too soon. For example, when you found your rabbit has defecated or urinated inside its food dish, quickly clean and dry it completely before filling it again and present it to your pet rabbit again.
- To prevent or at least minimize the amount of the leftover food, try to fill your rabbit food with the amount to only its needed for them not go hungry.
2. Refresh The Water Bottle
The freshness of the water you feed to your pet rabbit will affect its health. It’s important to provide your rabbit with its needs of water and the hygiene of its water bottle will affect the content of its water. Unclean, stale and tainted, can cause a bad smell if you provide it in closed space like a rabbit cage. Not only it will make the rabbit cage smelly, but it will also greatly jeopardize your rabbit health should they drink from it.
- Every end of the day, pour out the water in the water bottle and refill it.
- Make sure to clean any floating matter before you refill it if it somehow dissolved when you clean it, then better wash your water bottle with soapy water to make sure the water bottle is clean and safe to drink for the pet rabbit.
- Wash the water bottle every weeks or more if necessary.
- Using bottle brush or something similar like to brush will help you greatly to clean your pet rabbit water bottle more thoroughly.
Clean The Litter Area or Box
Commonly, the rabbit will defecate and urinate in the corner of its habitat. You can spot clean those mentioned corners. To give you easier time cleaning their mess, you can put a few litter boxes in the corner where your rabbit usually do their business. Should you need to train your rabbit to use the litter box, these “How To Do Litter Training For Your Rabbit?” article will help you greatly.
Replace the litter, hay or old newspaper once a day, and clean their litter box a week or more if necessary. By cleaning those litter area every day, it will prevent the bad odor to stay and minimizing the risk of bacterial build up that can affect your rabbit health.
- Make sure to thoroughly remove the soiled litter on the litter, hays or old newspapers before placing a new one.
- A safest makeshift disinfectant, Vinegar + water mixture will be your tools to keep your rabbit litter box clean thoroughly.
- While cleaning their litter box, you can put your rabbit in another safe place, you can keep and distract them with toys, and treat to keep them occupied.
- Do no use any cedar, pine shaving and clay based litter as your litter replacement, these materials can harm your rabbit. use pellet litter or old newspaper as their litter.
- While it seems gross, try to leave any particularly large and moist dropping. These things called cecotropes. Rabbit needs to eat those drops to maintain it’s own bowel health.
- You might also need this “How to Tell That Your Rabbit’s Pee and Poop Normal?” article to tell much more about their dropping, it will be quite important as you will observe it when you clean your rabbit litter dropping and can notice should there anything wrong with your rabbit through it’s dropping.
3. Throw The Old Toys Away
Rabbit love to dig and chew anything, so people often give a toy like a cardboard box old unused paper or book for their rabbit to claw, dig and play with it. Please check your rabbit toys once a week. Replace it if it becomes a scattered mess. Moisture is harmful to your rabbit, so should your rabbit toys is smell moist and mildew, especially their paper-based toys, please throw it away and replace a new one.
If you feel, providing and cleaning pet toys is troublesome, you can just let them play outside. Hopefully, this “8 Ways on How to Care for A Rabbit When Playing Outdoors” article will help you should you want to let your rabbit safe at playing outside.
4. Do Cage Deep-Clean Once in a Month
Inevitable, you need to do a thorough clean once in a month. which mean you have fully vacated your rabbit and let them play somewhere for a while. use your trusty and safe disinfectant (Vinegar + water mixture) to clean your rabbit cage thoroughly. after the cage has been cleaned and dry, put your rabbit back to its new shiny cage.
I hope this guide on how to keep your rabbit cage clean will provide you with helpful insight.