Please bear with my monstrosity of a post!
General Info:
I have a 2 year old neutered male named Gilbert fully litter box trained. I decided to get him a friend. She is 3 years old and unspayed (im getting her fixed in september) named Gwen she uses her litter box but also uses the bathroom all over my room.
Heres goes. I started off by introducing them through separate cages. they were curious and no signs of aggression. Their first face to face meet was a couple of days later and they did pretty well. The female mounted my poor Gilbert several times and he seemed to just let her do her thing. I did end up separating them because i felt really bad for my bun. After that i continued leaving their cages next to each other every day/night and gradually taking turns letting each one roam my room without the other bun free roaming too. (the other one would be in their designated cage) probably about 8 days ago is when i started to let them free roam my room together. At this point there were no signs of aggression toward each other, they would each explore each others cages and so forth, at one point both of them would end up being in one cage together just eating hay or something. About 5 or 6 days ago i noticed that they were starting to lick each others heads, kind of like grooming, so i saw this as a good sign. (i attached a picture of what it looked like female is the one on the left, Gilbert is the one on the bottom right)
Problem:
Out of no where in the last 3 days or so they have started to fight. The first fight happened in my room, i separated them and put them each back into their own cages. The next day i tried letting them roam again and another fight broke out, this time inside one of their cages (the smaller one) i also broke the one up and had to cover each buns head because of such close quarters i didn’t want them trying to nip at each other when removing the other one. Today i tried to let them roam, they seemed to be doing okay for the first 15 minutes i was even petting them next to each other and they were both laying down next to each other while i was petting them. After i stopped, within 3 minutes or so a fight broke out, so i put them back into their cages. I read that you are supposed to put them into neutral and enclosed territory to try and bond them so i gave them a 30 minutes break or so and grabbed a storage bin. I placed both buns inside with a couple of carrots. They didn’t pay attention to the carrots and didn’t seem to mind each other, i think they were just confused about what was going on. After a minute they tried to jump out so i covered the top with a blanket and left a corner open so i could keep an eye on them. As soon as i did that another fight broke out so i threw the blanket on top of one and took them each back to their respective cages. I thought they were doing so well i don’t know why all of the sudden they started to fight! how can i keep this from happening again? and how can i try to make this bonding successful??
On a side note, i did notice that the female has become slightly territorial about her cage. She has nipped me a couple times (started yesterday) when i stick my hand in there to move something around. I have also been watching them before fights break out to see who starts it or what is causing it and from what i’ve seen is that either one of them will start to nip/nibble on the other ones underbelly or something and them and then the fights break out. When i do separate them, the female still tries to bite and lunge (usually ends up biting me) while i am holding Gilbert.