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Not that you need any additional thoughts (you got lots of great ideas from people who raise lots of rabbits), but here's my 2 cents worth as someone who's had rabbits and was around them in labs, taught anatomy for many years, etc. If you don't want to go to a wire floor cage right now, newsprint is actually safer than something like carpet. They will chew on whatever is down there, and many of the dyes in carpets are absolutely lethal. I've had rabbits die from eating it. Newsprint itself is considered safe enough that it's used by public health nurses to create clean spaces to treat people in poverty conditions. Your rabbits will get blackened paws, but as long as that doesn't bother you it's ok. The last thing you might want to know is that although the wire cages are easier to clean, you have to feed more (and higher-
quality food) if you use them. Rabbits' digestive systems require them to run things through twice to get the nutrients out of it. They are like cows in that they have a beneficial bacterial colony living inside the gut that actually produces the digestive enzymes necessary to break down the cellulose in plants. The plants rabbits eat, therefore, actually feed the bacteria. Cows are the same way. Then, in both cases, the animal consumes the bacteria for its own nutrition. The rabbit or cow doesn't have enzymes that can break down cellulose (the primary component of plants), but the bacteria do. (We don't have the enzyme cellulase either, which is why lettuce, celery, etc are low-calorie foods to us; we can't digest them down. We also don't have internal bacterial colonies that can do it, though we have other colonies in our intestines that do other things to help out digestion.) Basically, cows and rabbits are bacteria-ranchers who harvest plant material to feed the bacteria, then digest the bacteria they raise. In cows, there are separate stomachs used for various parts of the conveyor-belt. When a cow eats grass out of the pasture, it swallows that into a stomach where the bacterial colonies live. From time to time, the cow burps up a big wad of that bacterial colony-digested grass-soup and it goes back into the mouth where the cow chews it up and adds saliva. This wad of stuff is the cud. Then the cow swallows the cud into a different and more final stomach that processes the material on through the body. In rabbits, unlike ruminants such as cows, the bacterial colony lives in an outpouch of the large intestine called the caecum. So to run everything through the system twice, it has to be pooped out first because the only place anything can go after being in the large intestine is outside the animal. Rabbits produce two different kinds of poop -- one kind is soft and dark green, the other smaller, hard, and black. The first kind isn't "done" yet, and the rabbit eats it. This is the pellet that is analogous to cud -- it is composed of bacteria, digested plant material, and so on. The rabbit eats that, digests the bacteria (which are mostly proteins for which the rabbit can produce digestive enzymes), and then poops out the real final-product waste, which is the black, hard pellet. When you have a wire floor, the rabbit can only get hold of the soft pellets to run them through their systems the second time if they pretty much catch them as they come out -- which you see them trying to do. Also, those pellets tend to stick to the wire because they're softer, and the rabbits try to eat them off there. But most fall through the screen. This significantly reduces the amount of nutrients the rabbit can get out of their feed. As you can see, they are raising the bacteria but then not getting anything much for themselves out of it all. If you have lots of rabbits, it doesn't work well (for hygeinic and practical reasons) to use anything BUT wire for the cage floor, but then you have to feed more food and it has to be especially high in proteins that the bacteria would otherwise provide, which is to say the proteins digestible by a rabbit. As with most things, you have to establish a trade-off between all the factors you're dealing with when you make a decision. But I thought since you already have cages with floors and newspapers, there might be a reason, and that you might want to know this other stuff. Hope that helps in some way. (Aren't you sorry you were the lucky one who finally asked a question about something I actually KNOW about? LOL) --Dawn
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