it's actually a bit like living in a horror movie right now

[cimorene]

We managed to live a couple of years with house rabbits without contracting a house fly problem, but after last summer's super-hot heat wave we have never managed to get them all gone.

In my pre-house rabbit life, and even with house rabbits until last summer, finding multiple flies indoors meant they'd found somewhere to lay eggs, and all we had to do was take out all the trash and clean things - sweep and vacuum and mop, clean the counters and surfaces etc.

But since last summer the flies have never left, and they're driving us nuts, and we've done those things THREE times, even though we now have an amount of furniture that makes it very difficult to do it in one day because of the amount of moving things involved. (Normally the cleaning of surfaces gets divided up and spread out over time to avoid being exhausting.)

But that hasn't helped.

According to my understanding, this probably means there's somewhere we've forgotten to include in the cleaning list, but I'm not really sure what it would be. Could they be in the plant pots? Or as one alarming google result suggested, in the drains? (Maybe we should just buy a bunch of drain cleaner again?) Why hasn't someone invented a detector????

Last night I made the mistake of googling house flies + house rabbits and learned that at least in the UK and North America, everyone is petrified of their rabbits getting fly strike, which I'm familiar with anecdotally for sheep. I attempted to read the information while averting my eyes from the gory pictures, but failed because they weren't properly spoiler cut so I'm probably going to have those images in my nightmares forever, and more importantly, the articles mostly just gave me the impression that I'm incredibly lucky that our buns have never gotten fly strike before. (Or maybe it's less luck and more that the buns are good at bathing themselves.)

But either way, while they clearly haven't ever had it, now I'm going to be paranoid and start examining the little miscreants daily, which they're definitely not going to enjoy. Apparently bunny butts are the biggest danger zones, and as you may or may not know, Touching the Butt is basically the most offensive thing you can do to a bunny, and has even been known to offend Rowan so badly that he wouldn't eat the treat I gave him (in apology) (at least not for a few minutes, and not until I wasn't watching anymore). (Eating the peace offering, for a bun, constitutes a partial acceptance of the apology, so for the most heinous of crimes they will abstain.)

I guess Chief Inspector Japp and Rowan are both about to get a lot more used to having their little floofy butts touched, and meanwhile, I haven't really learned anything that's likely to help me with this issue. Most of it was other house rabbit owners agreeing that you're probably fucked and the best thing is to prevent flies from ever getting inside in the first place, and debating which kinds of bunny litter are easiest to change. Apparently some house rabbit owners fill their litter boxes with expensive ~gourmet scented wood chips infused with fly-repelling herbs or something and ... still end up changing them once a day? (Message boards are full of commiseration about how smelly they are. Our rabbits' boxes have never been smelly and they don't have a problem with simple hay over newspaper litter. Maybe pierydys just fortuitously gave us the best breed for litter boxes...?)

Comments

[tripleransom]

I had another thought - I suppose rabbits would use pellet litter? It's pine pellets, so it keeps any odor down and the flies wouldn't like it unless it got really nasty (and then the rabbits wouldn't either) You can scoop it with a plastic scoop and take out any wet parts. It's expensive in little bags for pets, but very cheap in the 40-lb horse plastic bags, which you can get in any feed store. I have used it for the barn cats before. I know it's widely sold throughout Europe. WoodyPet is one brand, but I'm sure there are many other local ones. Pellet Bedding is the keyword.

As long as you get the trays thoroughly clean and let them dry completely, you should be good even without bleach. Flies need 1) a yucky food source and 2) moisture to breed. The big thing is to keep everything completely clean and dry.

[cimorene]

We actually use wood pellets for the cats. I didn't know they sell it for horses too! We'll have to make a visit to a feed store some time when we have a car at our disposal.