When I first brought Hazel home I tried to let her free range in my bedroom, but she peed on my bed so I put up a length of fencing across the room that allows her to come and go from her litterbox to the livingroom, but keeps her out of the part of my room that has the bed. It works fine but due to the shape of the room my bed is inside the cage and she gets the part of the room with access to the door, which can get pretty annoying having to go through a fence in the middle of the night to pee or whatever. Now that she is spayed (about 2 months ago) she has stopped trying to mark the couch and so I have tried letting her in my part of the room a couple times to see how she does on the bed and it turns out that she seems to be completely past peeing on my stuff.
The only problem is when I let her come over here she tries to dig and bite on my sheets and dig in the carpet beside the bed. This wouldn’t be too much of a problem, I would just put some scrap carpet down and chase her off the bed when she does it up there, except that if I try to stop her, she lunges at me and growls and will nip me if I don’t pull my hand back. She has only done that one other time when I was fixing a hole in the carpet that she had been digging and I kept chasing her off when she was trying to stick her face in the glue. But normally if I chase her off of something she just runs off.
So what is the best way to deal with this situation? I really want to get rid of the fence especially because within the last week or so she has taken to chewing on it when I am sleeping and I’m worried she is going to hurt her teeth.
I just want her to get the idea that my part of the bedroom is just like he rest of the house and not like my special territory that is up for grabs now.
I can roll the fence up so that there is no barrier or I can just open it a little bit.
When she lunged at me I chased her off and put the fence back so she cant go through, but I don’t know if I am just reinforcing the territorial-ness of the situation by doing that, or if I am doing the right thing by showing her that I can kick her out if she tries to act dominant. Maybe I should leave the fence down and just keep chasing her away until she gets it? I feel like if I have to keep chasing her off then it’s just like she is going to be more tempted to try to be naughty.
I also tried giving her pets when she was just hopping around and exploring and being good and thumping at her when she started tearing at the sheets with her teeth, but she just started ignoring me after a few tries.
Oh yeah and she is really not that territorial over her own space, if she notices me going in there she will run in and see what I’m doing but I sit in there and pet her sometimes and even when I am changing her litter box she doesn’t try anything.
I just need a bunny psychologist to let me know if what I am doing is counter productive.