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DIARRHEA

MY RABBITS EATING HIS POO. This is normal behaviour they are called caccotrophs and they look like a bunch of poo grapes. These poos contain proteins and vitamins which are absorbed on there second trip through the intestines. It the diet your feeding is high in carbohydrate and low in fibre then you will see  more of these. More fiber and less protine will make things better. These types of poo are very likely to get stuck to the fur of your rabbits bottom and then he will be very prone to fly strike.

 CONJUNCTIVITIS

This is the same as you can get and will cause redness and a white discharge from the eyes. It can be spread to both eyes. Treatment is often easy and your vet will give you antibiotic eye drops for it.This a bad case the hairhas come out and its very crusty. This needs to be dealt with. Another cause of the eye looking like this is when the tooth roots brow up to wards the tear ducts.

all photos taken at the rescue

PASTEURELLA [ SNUFFLES]

BLOAT

Bloat is when the stomach fills up with gas. The symptoms are the tummy looks like a blown up foot ball and the rabbit will not eat and will not want to move. They may grinding their teeth because of the pain. quite often they will not pass anything. The vast majority of rabbits will die its so hard to treat. You can help by making them move around give pineapple juice and food liquidized by mouth. Your vet should give a gut stimulant AND PAIN RELIEF IS VITAL. Bad diet or stress can be the cause.

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Coccidiosis is a commonly-seen cause of diarrhea, especially in the young animal. The organism responsible is a protozoan parasite, Eimeria steidae. Other forms of the Eimeria species can also cause disease.

There are two distinct forms of coccidiosis; liver and intestinal. Liver coccidiosis is usually affects the young to yearling animal, and is manifested largely on a non-clinical level, save for possible lack of gain, and perhaps a slight persistent diarrhea.

The intestinal form is more common, especially in those animals on high carbohydrate, low fiber diets. Signs are seen anywhere from three weeks of age through adulthood as populations of Eimeria become high enough to cause problems for GI tract.

Some signs of intestinal coccidiosis are: severe diarrhea with a sudden onset; persistent non-responsive diarrhea which is not alleviated by increasing fiber levels in the diet; or a positive fecal flotation test for coccidiosis.

Eimeria is a small protozoan parasite which colonizes the crypts of the intestinal wall. As higher numbers accumulate, damage may be done to the wall of the gut, and a diarrhea with an extremely distinctive odor is released.

Once smelt, never forgotten; a fecal flotation test should be performed immediately to differentiate coccidiosis from other causes. A positive result means it is time to treat the herd and step up one's disinfection program.

Coccida are parasites, and as such, shed eggs which are infective after 24 hours out of the body, which is why a disinfection program is essential. Daily removal of all fecal material from the cage wires, resting boards, and floors will aid greatly in reducing the occurrence of coccidial enteritis.

Liver coccidiosis is not usually a great cause of diarrhea, but is a significant cause of unthrifty appearance and lack of gain due to liver damage.

The damage done to the liver and bile duct can appear as small, pencil-point white areas on the liver; in some very severe cases, larger areas of the liver may be discolored.

These livers are not safe for human consumption and must be discarded, which is a complaint often heard from the processor as well.

Treatment of coccidiosis of either type may be accomplished by a common method.  This is the use of a sulfa drug such as sulfadimethoxine, sulfaquinoxaline, or sulfamethazine as directed by the veterinarian.

This drug class is one of the small number approved for rabbits; however, dosage should be determined by the veterinarian and caution must be taken to observe the prescribed withdrawal period before using the animals for meat of any kind.

Once treated, the animals generally recover without major recurrence. Outlook after treatment is promising, and unless the animal experienced severe and prolonged dehydration, recovery is swift and uneventful. Keeping dietary fiber levels high is helpful in encouraging recovery.

From SB in america

A second common diarrheal complex is what was formerly called mucoid enteritis, named that for the clear jellylike stools which appear as the disease progresses. As time and research have shown, mucoid enteritis was not entirely accurate as a name, so the title mucoid enteropathy was adopted to take in the many ramifications involved.

Mucoid enteropathy, or ME for short, affects usually young fryers on a high carbohydrate, low fiber diet, although there have been cases when a different diet composition was used. The initial signs appear as a slight listlessness and lack of appetite, combined with an insatiable thirst. The affected animal will commonly sit hunched, with its head high and front feet in the water crock. With automatic watering systems, the animal will again sit hunched directly beneath the valve and hold the head high. As this continues, grinding of the molar teeth will begin and a very liquid diarrhea will erupt.

After a period of 12-48 hours at this stage, the young animal will be extremely weak and begin discharging a clear, jellylike substance that may even be formed into stoollike pellets. The definitive diagnostic method for mucoid by the average rabbit breeder is to pick the animal up and shake it gently. If ME is present, this movement will produce a sound like a half-full Thermos bottle.

Dehydration in ME is a killer; animals provided with sufficient subcutaneous or IV fluids have a better chance to recover. Feeding straight fiber sources to encourage gut peristalsis recovery has been proven to be of value. If palpated, some animals will have a distended and doughy to hard cecum. For the commercial breeder, these animals are usually counted as a dead loss, as recovery is possible, but hardly worth the effort to them; the growth rate afterward is severely depressed. Affected animals are usually culled.

Preventive measures have varied over the years; from copper in the feed to a very high fiber level. A high incidence of ME is normally diet related; the precise cause is not yet known.

A finding linked to the impaction of the cecum is a pleural effusion, or fluid accumulation in the lungs. Animals with this phenomenon might recover in time also; but this result is doubtful.

Outlook is poor, few animals recover from this disease, and of those that do, virtually none do as well as they might.

It does seem to vary in incidence between geographical areas; perhaps this is something which might be intriguing to study.

Persistence, patience, and lots of good clean oat or grass hay seem to be the best and most available remedy and preventive at this point in time.

From SB in America