Lawrence B.
New Member
I hope this is the term I mean as I find Google a bit of a minefield when searching for this sort of thing. Anyway, I'll start at the beginning.
I found our first bunny, Charlie, in the local park. He'd been dumped and obviously wasn't going to do well in the wild. The local rabbit rescue said they had no places and couldn't take him, so we did despite already having a lot of cats because it seemed like the only choice. I built him a large hutch which we have in the front room, and thankfully he and the cats got on well once they were used to each other. In fact they played together. We have a cat colony (and have an official license from the city - San Antonio, Texas by the way) so we know cats, and we can tell the difference between play and play-hunting if this worries anyone. Anyway, we had Charlie for 18 months and we loved him, and he was very happy for most of the time, barring one incident of GI stasis which we treated immediately and from which he recovered.
Last November we had a call from a neighbour who had a domestic bunny wild in her garden (presumably dumped) whom she hadn't been able to catch. She was moving house and the new occupants were bringing large dogs so she was worried. The bunny, whom we named Maisie, hopped right up to my wife and so we brought her home, reasoning one more shouldn't make too much difference. We kept her in the living room in a largish growing frame, which is where we had kept Charlie while I was building his hutch. We reasoned that if we had them both fixed they would hopefully be able to share the hutch - we hadn't had Charlie fixed because it hadn't seemed necessary when it was just him. We took them both to the vet to be fixed within a week of Maisie's arrival. Unfortunately, the vet said she couldn't operate on Maisie because her heart seemed to be doing something worrying when they tried to anaesthetise her. More unfortunately, Charlie wasn't doing well after his surgery and soon went into GI stasis, popping his stitches. The wound became infected. We rushed him back to the vet but it was too late.
So now we had just Maisie. She'd been in a bad way when we got her, but we nursed her back to health and she put on weight and became perkier. The strangest thing was she had one ear which was permanently drooped while the other stood up. Some internet person suggested this occasionally happened where someone had a lop-eared bunny in their family tree. Then after another week her lazy ear suddenly stood up and stayed up, so we guessed it had been a symptom of her living rough etc. As with Charlie, she got on fine with the cats and became perky and happy. The vet had told us she had pasteurella, so we took particular care with her, and the sneezing fits she'd had at the beginning seemed to clear up. She had a couple of happy months with us and then suddenly came down with GI stasis, for no reason we could work out. We rushed her to the vet (a different vet) but, as with Charlie, it was too late.
As an aside here, this second vet x-rayed Maisie and said she had really terrible congenital deformities with her heart, lungs, and stomach, and it was probably a miracle she had lasted as long as she did. At one point her heart had apparently stopped and then just started up again. This left me somewhat cynical about the first vet, the one who operated on Charlie, given that she hadn't detected any of this. On the day my wife had taken them both to that first vet, I also remember thinking Maisie still seemed perilously underweight and it later struck me as odd that they had even begun to prep her for the operation, with this in mind.
Naturally we were devastated, because it's been a pretty rough year even without bunny deaths.
Anyway, we got another bunny a few days later because someone had contacted my wife saying she'd found a baby dumped at some fast food place, and she herself couldn't look after him with big dogs in the house. Okay, we said and took in Tony who was just four months. We felt we understood at least some of the potential perils of keeping a rabbit by this point - Charlie's death had been something we're not sure we could have avoided (unless there was some sort of negligence on the part of the vet in question) and poor Maisie had clearly not been destined to live a long full life, so this time we were going to get it right.
We had two wonderful months with Tony, same as before, and he got on fine with the cats, then suddenly just last week - GI stasis, vet, and this time a twisted gut. There was nothing we could have done that we hadn't done, so far as we can tell.
Needless to say, it's been horrible losing three rabbits in the space of about six months, one after the other. We took care to feed them properly, mainly good quality hay plus whatever they've eaten while in the run I made for them so they could spend some time outside in the mornings before the Texan heat kicked in. We checked what they can and can't eat while out in the yard, did all our homework, never let them outside if it was too wet. The fact that we had Charlie for a year and a half during which he was clearly happy suggests we can't have been doing too much that was wrong. We've always kept an eye on them when they're running about the house with the cats to make sure no-one gets too rough with anyone else. Yet we've seen bunny owners on facebook who feed their rabbit's pizza and all sorts of crap, yogurt "treats", an endless stream of just lettuce and carrots etc. and who somehow manage to keep their bunnies alive year after year.
We'd love another bunny, particularly given the rate at which uncaring owners seem to dump them in this city, and yet it feels as though it would be unfair to bunnykind generally, like we've been cursed by some angry rabbit God.
The vet told us Tony's GI stasis could have been brought on either by stress or something he ate which he shouldn't have. Earlier in the week, one of the cats found her way into the hutch as Tony was hopping about on the sofa, and we somehow forgot to make he usual check before we closed him up for the night; so when I got up in the morning I found him sat next to Muffin (the cat) in his hutch. This has happened a couple of times before with Charlie, but never seemed to bother him, and as Tony and Muffin certainly seemed to be friends, we still can't believe sharing his (large two-storey) hutch with her could have been so stressful as to induce GI stasis, but maybe it was, although he didn't seem stressed at the time. He nibbled cardboard a lot, but surely it couldn't have been that, and we always kept an eye on him as he ran around the house.
I spoke to my father on the phone (I'm from England by the way, and he still lives there) and asked him about raising rabbits when he was young. My grandfather ran a farm and used to breed them professionally for show and had about fifty, so my dad claims. My family were also farmers when I was growing up and I vaguely remembered our cattle occasionally suffering from this twisted gut thing, which was why I asked my dad. So here finally is my question: my dad claimed that both cattle and rabbits can occasionally get their stomachs twisted up simply through fighting or, in the case of rabbits, leaping about in a certain way. Much as I respect his agricultural wisdom, this seems sort of unlikely to me. If rabbits could injure themselves simply through running around and jumping, would there even be any rabbits around today?
If it's possible for a rabbit to injure itself this way regardless of how hard we try to get it right, it makes me very reluctant to take on another bunny because, as I say, I don't think I could stand the heartache of losing another one.
Hope that hasn't been too depressing to read. Any perspective appreciated. In the unlikely event that anyone needs to read more, I posted about these bunnies on my blog here, here, here, and here. The blog posts also include photos of the bunnies and the hutch I made etc.
Thanks for reading.
I found our first bunny, Charlie, in the local park. He'd been dumped and obviously wasn't going to do well in the wild. The local rabbit rescue said they had no places and couldn't take him, so we did despite already having a lot of cats because it seemed like the only choice. I built him a large hutch which we have in the front room, and thankfully he and the cats got on well once they were used to each other. In fact they played together. We have a cat colony (and have an official license from the city - San Antonio, Texas by the way) so we know cats, and we can tell the difference between play and play-hunting if this worries anyone. Anyway, we had Charlie for 18 months and we loved him, and he was very happy for most of the time, barring one incident of GI stasis which we treated immediately and from which he recovered.
Last November we had a call from a neighbour who had a domestic bunny wild in her garden (presumably dumped) whom she hadn't been able to catch. She was moving house and the new occupants were bringing large dogs so she was worried. The bunny, whom we named Maisie, hopped right up to my wife and so we brought her home, reasoning one more shouldn't make too much difference. We kept her in the living room in a largish growing frame, which is where we had kept Charlie while I was building his hutch. We reasoned that if we had them both fixed they would hopefully be able to share the hutch - we hadn't had Charlie fixed because it hadn't seemed necessary when it was just him. We took them both to the vet to be fixed within a week of Maisie's arrival. Unfortunately, the vet said she couldn't operate on Maisie because her heart seemed to be doing something worrying when they tried to anaesthetise her. More unfortunately, Charlie wasn't doing well after his surgery and soon went into GI stasis, popping his stitches. The wound became infected. We rushed him back to the vet but it was too late.
So now we had just Maisie. She'd been in a bad way when we got her, but we nursed her back to health and she put on weight and became perkier. The strangest thing was she had one ear which was permanently drooped while the other stood up. Some internet person suggested this occasionally happened where someone had a lop-eared bunny in their family tree. Then after another week her lazy ear suddenly stood up and stayed up, so we guessed it had been a symptom of her living rough etc. As with Charlie, she got on fine with the cats and became perky and happy. The vet had told us she had pasteurella, so we took particular care with her, and the sneezing fits she'd had at the beginning seemed to clear up. She had a couple of happy months with us and then suddenly came down with GI stasis, for no reason we could work out. We rushed her to the vet (a different vet) but, as with Charlie, it was too late.
As an aside here, this second vet x-rayed Maisie and said she had really terrible congenital deformities with her heart, lungs, and stomach, and it was probably a miracle she had lasted as long as she did. At one point her heart had apparently stopped and then just started up again. This left me somewhat cynical about the first vet, the one who operated on Charlie, given that she hadn't detected any of this. On the day my wife had taken them both to that first vet, I also remember thinking Maisie still seemed perilously underweight and it later struck me as odd that they had even begun to prep her for the operation, with this in mind.
Naturally we were devastated, because it's been a pretty rough year even without bunny deaths.
Anyway, we got another bunny a few days later because someone had contacted my wife saying she'd found a baby dumped at some fast food place, and she herself couldn't look after him with big dogs in the house. Okay, we said and took in Tony who was just four months. We felt we understood at least some of the potential perils of keeping a rabbit by this point - Charlie's death had been something we're not sure we could have avoided (unless there was some sort of negligence on the part of the vet in question) and poor Maisie had clearly not been destined to live a long full life, so this time we were going to get it right.
We had two wonderful months with Tony, same as before, and he got on fine with the cats, then suddenly just last week - GI stasis, vet, and this time a twisted gut. There was nothing we could have done that we hadn't done, so far as we can tell.
Needless to say, it's been horrible losing three rabbits in the space of about six months, one after the other. We took care to feed them properly, mainly good quality hay plus whatever they've eaten while in the run I made for them so they could spend some time outside in the mornings before the Texan heat kicked in. We checked what they can and can't eat while out in the yard, did all our homework, never let them outside if it was too wet. The fact that we had Charlie for a year and a half during which he was clearly happy suggests we can't have been doing too much that was wrong. We've always kept an eye on them when they're running about the house with the cats to make sure no-one gets too rough with anyone else. Yet we've seen bunny owners on facebook who feed their rabbit's pizza and all sorts of crap, yogurt "treats", an endless stream of just lettuce and carrots etc. and who somehow manage to keep their bunnies alive year after year.
We'd love another bunny, particularly given the rate at which uncaring owners seem to dump them in this city, and yet it feels as though it would be unfair to bunnykind generally, like we've been cursed by some angry rabbit God.
The vet told us Tony's GI stasis could have been brought on either by stress or something he ate which he shouldn't have. Earlier in the week, one of the cats found her way into the hutch as Tony was hopping about on the sofa, and we somehow forgot to make he usual check before we closed him up for the night; so when I got up in the morning I found him sat next to Muffin (the cat) in his hutch. This has happened a couple of times before with Charlie, but never seemed to bother him, and as Tony and Muffin certainly seemed to be friends, we still can't believe sharing his (large two-storey) hutch with her could have been so stressful as to induce GI stasis, but maybe it was, although he didn't seem stressed at the time. He nibbled cardboard a lot, but surely it couldn't have been that, and we always kept an eye on him as he ran around the house.
I spoke to my father on the phone (I'm from England by the way, and he still lives there) and asked him about raising rabbits when he was young. My grandfather ran a farm and used to breed them professionally for show and had about fifty, so my dad claims. My family were also farmers when I was growing up and I vaguely remembered our cattle occasionally suffering from this twisted gut thing, which was why I asked my dad. So here finally is my question: my dad claimed that both cattle and rabbits can occasionally get their stomachs twisted up simply through fighting or, in the case of rabbits, leaping about in a certain way. Much as I respect his agricultural wisdom, this seems sort of unlikely to me. If rabbits could injure themselves simply through running around and jumping, would there even be any rabbits around today?
If it's possible for a rabbit to injure itself this way regardless of how hard we try to get it right, it makes me very reluctant to take on another bunny because, as I say, I don't think I could stand the heartache of losing another one.
Hope that hasn't been too depressing to read. Any perspective appreciated. In the unlikely event that anyone needs to read more, I posted about these bunnies on my blog here, here, here, and here. The blog posts also include photos of the bunnies and the hutch I made etc.
Thanks for reading.
