Sophie and the litter boxes

Oh sweet little Sophie, she’s such an angel….when she’s sleeping!

She is currently driving us up the wall. The new Bunny Olympics sport she is training for is digging, the problem her training grounds are the litter boxes. We keep two boxes, one in the cage and one in the floor off to the side where Sawyer can kind of hide and do his business. For whatever reason he decided along the way that he might drop a few pellets here and there in the one in the cage but strangely enough his choice of boxes to go in is the one in the floor. He actually use to get upset if you didn’t let him out to go to the bathroom as soon as you get home. Since Sophie has come along his habits have changed a little and he will sometimes go in the cage, there lies the problem. They are both litter box trained but Sophie digs all of the litter out, so whether or not there is litter in the box or in Sawyer’s case the area where the box is suppose to be they go. Of course she always waits until someone has done their business before she empties the box which makes it all the messier. I’ve had a dig box with just paper out but she really hasn’t had any interest in it. I’ve tried several things like taking the outside litter box away and putting a dig box with just paper in it which Sophie just ignored but Sawyer went in anyway. I also tried taking the box off of the floor altogether but unfortunately, Sawyer is firmly trained on where his box is suppose to be and that is where he goes regardless so we have to have a box out for him. After the umpteenth time of picking up used litter off the floor my solution was to use a box bigger than the litter box and leave part of the flaps on it so that it folds over the box and only leaves a small area to jump in, it works because she can’t get the litter high enough and most of it stays in the litter box. In the cage the litter problem is a whole other story. She waits until late a night at bed time and spends the whole night making sure that there is not a single piece of litter left in the box. The only thing that worked there was to put only hay in the box but it was just a smelly mess, I then tried putting a thin layer of litter in the bottom and hay completely covering it but the next morning she had dug it all out again. I think my next idea might be to line both boxes with newspaper and then just put hay over it. Maybe it’s just the material Sophie likes but the digging has gotten real annoying and we are going to have to find her another outlet besides litter boxes.