Fun Toys For Rabbits: Bunny Castles

As anyone who has a house bunny will know, it doesn't take much for a rabbit to get bored and start destroying your home with great skill and efficiency. Owners of bored bunnies quite often find that their sofas have been remodeled in the latest burrow style, the television doesn't work because bunny decided that the cord should not be running behind the back of the set along the floor like that, and wooden furniture starts to look as if it has been attacked by a rogue troop of angry termites.

One solution to this problem is to bunny proof your home, which means removing stray wires from places that bunnies can get their teeth on them, taping them up etc. But you can't remove all your furniture from the floor, so the other option you have is to provide your rabbit with toys it can remodel and destroy.

Bunnies are quite intelligent little creatures, and they need mental stimulation in order to be content. Some bunnies are great 'builders', meaning that they love to chew on things and rip things up, and generally create a nice little home for themselves. Bunny castles are the perfect solution for this type of rabbit, and they can be made with just a few cardboard boxes too!

A word of warning though, if you notice that your bunny is eating the cardboard instead of just ripping it up, then you should take away the cardboard, as this can lead to blockages and death. You can make your own bunny castle by getting several cardboard boxes and cutting holes in the sides for the rabbit to run through. The holes should not be too large, just sufficient for the bunny to get through. They will want to redesign the doorways themselves later on, so its best you keep things simple. Placing several of these boxes together creates kind of a maze, or a tunnel, and your bunny is sure to love running through it, peeking over it, hiding behind it, and if you use several boxes not just one in front of the other, but next to one another, they will soon learn to go from 'room' to 'room',

What makes it a castle? Well, a turret of course! The turret is more for your pleasure than the rabbit's but there is no reason why you shouldn't have fun making your bunny toys too. Simply take a cardboard box, raise the flaps so that the are vertical, and cut slots in at regular intervals to create ramparts. This box can then slot on top of one underneath it, creating a fun dark space for your bunny to hide in.

The pictures are of Wicket the bunny enjoying just such a fun castle. The best thing about it is that the boxes can be taken apart to form different configurations, or folded away for storage, which means that you can set up a bunny play land and take it down within minutes.