The free placing was needed to get the idea where they can be and where not. Learning about the rabbits' behaviour was part of the game. Just private threads shouldn't be an allowed destination. Not being able to re-catch manually placed bunnies is a nice twist!
And changing that while the game runs is the next problem and I even regret having asked for the "xmas costumes" for bunnies which did lead to the 3rd bunny instead of just different images for the existing two. So much has gone wrong now with that game ... and no matter which way we now change things, this run of the game is and will stay kind of broken.
Sigh!
Reality bites.