Rabbits are incredible animals that make wonderful pets. They are playful, interactive, cuddly, and can have great relationships with their owners. However, when figuring out these cute and fluffy animals, you may ask whether rabbits can chew through metal. So, what is the answer to that question, and what should you do about it? Let’s find out below.

At first glance, rabbits would not be animals you would assume had an incredible desire to destroy almost anything in their path. However, the opposite is true in most cases. Rabbits can chew through certain kinds of metal, wood, plastic, vinyl, and other materials that might surprise you.

Another glaring question arises: Why do rabbits need to gnaw on everything in creation? The answer lies in their teeth, which are the “root” of the problem (all jokes aside). Their teeth grow insanely fast and never stop growing, which means they constantly need to whittle them down.

This article discusses many topics, like why rabbits chew through metal and how you can stop it. We encourage you to continue reading for more information if you need to know these things.

 

Can a Rabbit Chew Through Metal?

 

Yes, rabbits have been documented chewing through various kinds of metals. They are usually softer varieties, but given enough time, dedication, and energy, there are not many metals they cannot make some kind of mark on, at the very least.

The logic behind that scenario is truly just a question of time. Similarly, a small trickle of water can eventually see directly through rock, and a rabbit’s teeth are constantly growing.

So, while they may not do a lot of damage to any particular object at once, they will inevitably scratch the material first with the nibbling. A rabbit will eventually work their way deeper and further into it until the rabbit gets bored of it or the material itself is severed.

 

What Are Common Reasons Why Rabbits Chew Through Metal?

 

Perplexingly enough, there are several reasons why rabbits chew through metal or anything else. While they can be as mundane as being bored and having nothing better to do, they go through various emotional states that utilize chewing as an outlet to “voice” their frustrations and anxieties.

1. Their Cage Is Too Small

 

Assuming for a moment that the cage you have them in makes them feel cramped or uncomfortable. In that case, the rabbit may begin attempting to escape, fully embracing the logic that the grass is greener on the other side.

Whether that statement is true in their situation, the simple understanding is that they are unsatisfied with the size of their dwelling. Your options are to purchase a bigger enclosure that will allow your rabbit to roam to its full content or suffer the consequences of escaping.

Alternatively, if you feel that getting a bigger cage isn’t the best option or simply cannot afford one, taking your rabbit to a local animal shelter could be a solution.

You can also try to find a larger cage on an online Marketplace, as many people will give the cages away, or you can find one relatively cheap. Truthfully, keeping them in a small cage isn’t fair to the animal, as most accommodations can be made with minor adjustments over time.

2. Rabbits Need a Companion

 

While it might surprise some, rabbits are innately social creatures. As such, they desperately need a friend to lead a fulfilling lifestyle. Without a partner to share their life with, rabbits will grow increasingly on edge, angry, frustrated, and eventually demoralized.

In these bouts of frustration and other emotions, your rabbit may default to the calming practice of gnawing, which, unfortunately enough, can be anything within the vicinity of the cage or the cage itself (for those of you with free-roaming rabbits, you can think about them mistaking the wiring to your expensive appliances as spaghetti). Nothing is safe from them in these moods, so it’s better to appease them.

3. They Are Bored

 

The overwhelming power of boredom can attach itself to almost everyone and, to a lesser extent, anything, and rabbits are no exception. If they find their homes relatively vacant with little to do, filing down their teeth is always fun in their eyes and a welcome distraction from the stagnation they might be facing.

Gauging whether or not your rabbit’s enclosure is too dull can be difficult for certain people. However, a few toys, perhaps some tunnels, and other things your bunny can climb around will help them explore and express themselves.

Truly invested owners can even keep a myriad of toys on standby and a regular rotation of different ones they allow their rabbits to play with throughout the week, swapping them out to keep the experiences fresh.

Another option is to consider using things you already have at home, like toilet paper rolls, egg cartons, and cardboard boxes. You can easily make your own toys with many of these items, as shown in this article.

4. The Environment Needs to Be More Stimulating

 

While this might be confused with them being bored, the primary difference is that the very place they live, not the objects within it that they interact with, is tiring or bland. This causes your animal to lack immersion or, worse, a certain kind of dissonance that causes them to feel uncomfortable simply being in the cage.

Altering your rabbit’s cage doesn’t need to be a giant adventure for you personally or financially. Things like small plants around the outer edges of the cage or little baubles occasionally dotted around the area can do a lot of good to help your rabbit feel more entertained when it casually stares around the cage from time to time.

Additionally, suppose your rabbit does not have a playmate. In that case, this situation can be greatly exaggerated as they are more immersed in what is happening around them than what is directly near them. A new companion can make a world of difference here.

5. Your Rabbit Is Frustrated

 

Everyone expresses frustration in different ways. Some pray, some meditate, and some get incredibly angry and feel a need to destroy something. While rabbits probably won’t indulge in the first two options, they can get their teeth into something and get some relief in one way or another.

The greater issue here is knowing that your rabbit is frustrated about something in the first place and then finding out what said issue is to remedy it. This can be done by observing the rabbit and looking for specific social cues that allow you to glean what is happening and why it is so upset.

Long-time rabbit owners know that their ears are a huge indicator of their overall state of being, but how they stand or rest can also be very telling. Tight and tense stances can signal that something is off, and more so if they are staring directly at the source of the unease.

Other signs could include constantly running around, sometimes bouncing off the edges of the cage, hiding, or noticing that their noses aren’t wiggling from side to side. These will all let you know something is off. So, investigate carefully, or they’ll continue chewing the cage until you get lucky and figure out what’s ailing them.

6. They Are Getting up in Age

 

While it might be noted that a younger rabbit has the energy to chew constantly and will happily return to the same spot as if on a secret mission, older rabbits may wonder back to a place of comfort and chew simply out of creature comfort or because they don’t want to do anything else.

In either circumstance, you should try your best to redirect your rabbit’s energy into something more productive or, at the very least, less destructive.

There are a few different ways to prevent rabbits from needing to chew, but if they begin to lose sight of what they want to do, then there isn’t much of a solution.

 

How Do You Keep Your Rabbit From Chewing Through Their Hutch?

 

Knowing that your adorable pet rabbit can eventually see through metal is reason enough to sound the alarm for almost everything in your home. Still, given that a hutch is much easier to damage and often far more expensive than a bit of cage, it only makes sense that you might be curious how to mitigate some of this relentless chewing.

Thankfully, once again, a handful of options will give your hutch some safety. Temporary as it might be if you have multiple rabbits or other factors that might cause your rabbits to get nervous enough to nibble on it (think surprise actions from children, etc., that may frighten the little creature into a bout of spontaneous chewing, for example).

 

1. Spay or Neuter Your Rabbit

 

As puberty often makes most of us an emotional trainwreck of people, rabbits go through their “phases,” if you will. With everything from spraying and marking their territory to chewing and attempting to attack their former playmates, rabbits have a rough go of it when it comes to reaching sexual maturity.

Unfortunately, these growing pains often release themselves on your household, property, or other rabbits who just happen to be caught in the crossfire. So, action must be taken to re-establish order in the cage, let alone your house.

A rabbit that has been spayed or neutered has its sexual drive severely limited, and most of these negative urges that they formally display are cut down dramatically! More often than not, they stop entirely, which means you can rest assured that your hutch will be almost wholly off-limits, assuming you take this step.

 

2. Provide More Hay to Your Rabbits

 

Hunger strikes us all in different ways, and while people may be more likely to be irritable, irrational, and generally annoying to be around when they are hungry. Rabbits, animals as they are, will just eyeball whatever is nearest to them and happily begin chewing, if only to satiate themselves temporarily.

The answer is simple: add more hay to dissuade them from attacking your hutch. Most rabbits are inclined to eat at least their body weight in hay daily. Hence, it makes sense that they may feel peckish occasionally, especially if you’ve had a busy day and your feeding timer is a few minutes off.

However, extra hay isn’t always the best solution to this issue. Also, adding more food doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve found the root of the problem, as you’ll need to observe your rabbits intently to guarantee that hunger was indeed the underlying issue in the first place.

 

3. Spend Some Time Outdoors

 

Having a breath of fresh air can do wonders for just about anyone, and rabbits are no exception to this rule. They are innately animals, and they can greatly appreciate the sense of freedom and bonding time with nature.

Spending even a few minutes in the great outdoors can do wonders for your rabbits. Everything from the sights and sounds to fresh grass can go a long way toward easing their tension and granting them an overwhelming sense of peace.

You will need to display some extreme diligence before allowing your rabbits to spend any time outside, though, as several factors can prove innately dangerous for your fluffy little friend.

Some of these may be obvious to you. Things like snakes, dogs, hawks, and other potential predators can all make a snack of your rabbit. Never mind the concept that they may happen to wander into areas that they shouldn’t be, which can inevitably get them hurt or even cause you to lose sight of them.

 

4. Train Them Not to With Positive Reinforcement

 

Positive reinforcement has been around for ages, and it works because you actively retrain their brains into behaviors they might not normally display by rewarding them for behaviors you want to see.

In turn, you would be creating a circular thought process that allows your rabbit to assume that if it displays desirable behaviors, it will receive a treat in return. Now, this is a fantastic solution to chewing of any kind, hutch or not, but it also comes with some potential ramifications.

Depending on what kind of treat you are giving your rabbit, you may end up overfeeding it or causing it never to display these behaviors unless the treats are visible or you aren’t there. Exercise caution and watch a few videos to learn how to utilize this tactic appropriately.

 

5. Give Your Rabbit More of Your Time

 

There are times when your rabbit simply misses you and wants time with its owner but cannot accurately express that desire. Unfortunately, they cannot simply talk and tell us their needs. To that end, they may display negative behavior to get any kind of reaction from you.

While it might not make sense initially, try to view it as if you don’t really offer your rabbit much of your time at all. If they begin chewing on the hutch or really anything they aren’t supposed to, you will stop what you are doing and go over to them to either correct the situation or handle them.

In doing so, you are giving them a bit of your time, something they may not have received had they behaved themselves. So, in giving you a reason to come over, they get the petting or basic interaction that gives them a break from their boredom. As we know, this is a large overarching concern that instigates a lot of this chewing behavior.

 

6. Provide More of an Enrichment

 

Chewing on their hutch as a means of getting you to interact with them is very much the same kind of attitude as them not having enough activities to immerse themselves in on a daily basis. Instead of seeking an answer or interaction from you, they may need a more lively lifestyle or areas in their enclosures that provide more engagement.

Anything from more enticing and engaging toys to environments that allow them to feel as if they have more control over their day-to-day routine can enrich your rabbit and eventually quell these negative behaviors.

 

7. Bunny-Proof Your House and Let Them Roam

 

The very concept of “bunny-proofing” your home is a complex subject to grasp. It will take a great many hours of your day to accomplish, but after the work is done, you can reap the fruits of your labors, and that will be your rabbit engaging with you more casually, and the animal itself feels as if it is more keenly a part of your home and family.

While it might not seem like much, having the ability to explore most of your home is a great sense of freedom and joy to a rabbit, as they either haven’t had the pleasure of doing so yet or they’ve found particular places. Objects that entertain them, and as such, will be much less likely to chew or be destructive.

All great things do come to an end, however, and while this might not be the end of your rabbits exploring your home, you will want to have an eye or two on where they go and what they get up to. However, as they are still animals, they may need to relieve themselves whilst exploring, which can be problematic if it happens under a couch, for example, and you don’t know what you need to clean.

 

Is Metal Toxic to Rabbits?

 

The metal itself isn’t exactly toxic to rabbits. Still, like most animals, if they happen to ingest things like lead, they are prone to getting severe lead poisoning eventually, which can cause nerve cell damage and inevitably lead to their death.

Being extremely vigilant about the kinds of metals your rabbits’ cages are made out of and what areas they can slink off to if they are free-roaming rabbits will make all the difference in whether or not metal toxicity plays a factor in your rabbit’s life.

Above, we spoke briefly about bunny-proofing your home, and unfortunately, this is but another very important aspect of that same train of thought. Anything that might be poisonous, cause intestinal damage when ingested, or harm the rabbit upon entering its mouth can be problematic in the long run.

 

Can Rabbits Chew Through Steel?

 

Yes, rabbits can chew through certain kinds of steel. As most people know, chicken wire, one of the leading kinds of caging materials for rabbits, is made out of galvanized steel wiring, which means that if your rabbit chews through this, it is, in turn, chewing through steel.

While this is a horrifying concept, it gets worse. There are, truthfully, very few objects or materials that a rabbit cannot chew through given enough time, and they have the energy to do so. Your best bet is to regulate your rabbits’ behavior and try to convince them to nibble elsewhere.

 

What Can Rabbits Not Chew Through?

 

It might sound crazy, but truthfully, there aren’t many materials in the world that a rabbit cannot chew through. The issue truly boils down to the verbiage. If someone means “chew through,” as in going directly through, like chewing a cord in half, you would be limited to objects they would have enough time to sever, whether in their lifetime or everyday interactions.

If your definition of chewing through was something they could not damage with their teeth, then you might be looking at very high-grade, reinforced, flat portions of steel where it is almost impossible for them to “bite” in the first place.

Other instances of this situation might involve things that are so incredibly dangerous or bad for the rabbit that they wouldn’t be able to, like toxic materials or live wires with extremely high voltage.

 

Final Words

 

Rabbits can most definitely chew through metal, and while that is bad, it also means rabbits can very easily chew through almost everything inside and around your home, with minimal repercussion to them for doing so, bearing that in mind, it’s better to engage in preventative measures and proper training than to try and find something that they simply cannot chew through.