She Sleeps in the Litter Box (And Smells Like Pee)
I am Azmi, writing from Meknes, and I need to introduce Jolene properly before I defend her strangest habit: she is eight years old, she commands a fifty-square-foot night enclosure plus full free roam by day, she owns a real bed with blankets I wash and fold like a boutique hotel, and every single night she walks past all of it and sleeps in the litter box. Not beside it. In it. Lounges in it like a sunbather. She wakes up smelling faintly of pee by her own choice, and no committee of humans has ever persuaded her otherwise.
A quirk profile, as I understand it, demands that I stop asking why she does it for one evening and simply document how she does it, the way a naturalist documents a bird that builds its nest upside down. So here is Jolene’s method. She eats her hay first, standing tall in the box, sorting strands with the focus of a jeweller. Then she turns one tight circle, paws at the hay layer to flatten it, and lowers herself sideways with a soft exhale, chin resting on the box rim. Within minutes her eyes go half-lidded. Within ten she is fully flopped, legs tucked, ears soft, the very picture of a rabbit who has found her mattress. The actual mattress sits three feet away, untouched, blanket smoothed by nobody.
The nap itself, in detail
What fascinates me is the lounging, not just the sleeping. A tired rabbit will nap anywhere once; Jolene treats the box as a living room. On warm afternoons here in Meknes I find her sprawled diagonally across it, one ear draped over the edge, watching the room go by. When I offer a treat she eats it there rather than carrying it to the rug. When the other blanket calls, she ignores it. I once timed her: forty-five minutes of pure box lounging on a Saturday, punctuated by two hay snacks and one enormous yawn, while her beautiful bed sat empty like a stage with no actor. Comfort, she insists, is where the hay is, and she has eight years of evidence.
I have developed three theories, all unproven, all argued with friends who keep rabbits. Theory one is scent: the box smells like her, completely and unapologetically, and a prey animal may find that reassuring in a way my lavender-washed blankets never will be. Theory two is temperature and texture: the hay layer breathes, the box walls hug her sides, and the whole arrangement holds her shape the way a good armchair holds yours. Theory three, my favourite, is simply habit hardened into identity: she started it as a youngster, nobody stopped her, and now the box is her room in the way a childhood bedroom stays your room forever. I rotate which theory I believe depending on the day. Jolene believes in none of them. She just naps.
How I manage the chosen bedroom
Management, because that is the part I control. Since the box doubles as a bed, I clean it twice daily, morning and evening, with fresh hay on top each time so she always sleeps on a clean layer. I use a generously sized box so she can stretch without pressing against damp corners, and I keep a second box available, which she uses for business and occasionally inspects like a landlord before returning to her favourite. My cleaning log for this corner lives among my litter corner setup and cleaning notes, where I track what actually keeps the station fresh through a Meknes summer. The bed still gets offered nightly, blanket fluffed, in the same spot. It is declined nightly, with the same serene expression. The ritual of offering matters to me even if the outcome never changes.
On health I defer entirely to my veterinarian. Anything involving litter habits, urine smell on fur, or skin under a damp coat is a question I bring to the clinic, not something I diagnose from the living-room rug. My job at home is observation: I watch that she eats and drinks normally, that her underside stays clean and dry on the fresh hay, and that her behaviour matches her usual self. If anything ever looked sore, dirty beyond normal, or simply off, I would be on the phone to the vet that day. Fellow box-sleeper owners in my circle do the same, and the running joke is that our vets know our rabbits’ bedroom preferences better than our families do.
There is a small fellowship of us, I have learned. Mention box-sleeping in any rabbit group and the confessions pour in: the Holland Lop who naps in the corner of the tray, the giant who squeezes into a box half his size, the senior who abandoned a forty-dirham bed for a pile of hay. Dirty-box flop enjoyers exist, and mine leads them with grey-muzzled pride. I once tried every bed recommendation on the market: donut beds, flat mats, a fleece cave, a miniature sofa that embarrasses me to this day. Jolene sniffed each one, sat in it for the length of one photograph, and returned to the box before the camera cooled. Bed recommendations are now officially unwanted in this house.
Her age gives the habit a tenderness I did not expect. At eight she is a senior lady with opinions earned over thousands of days, and there is something moving about an old rabbit who knows exactly what she likes. I think of the bed she rejected, which I documented back when she stole the dog bed and never gave it back, and I laugh, because even that famous theft ended with her dragging the spoils toward the litter corner. Everything she loves migrates box-ward eventually. I have stopped fighting geography.
So the profile closes where it opened: Jolene, eight, fifty square feet, full roam, real bed, blankets, everything, asleep in the hay tray with her chin on the rim and her conscience perfectly clear. I change the hay, I smooth the blanket nobody uses, and I let the old girl dream where she pleases. Eight years of box naps and counting, and if she wants year nine in the same spot, the same spot will be clean, dry, and waiting. Comfort is where the hay is, and the hay is where Jolene says it is.
Next in this chapter…
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