red urine in a male bunny

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anaotilia

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puerto plata, , Dominican Republic
my bunny, Pucci 2, after his castration 3weeks ago, follows to have a red carrot colour of the urine, he daily eats carrots but the same eat all my other rabbits with no this red colour.
his health seems good except he is a little stiff in his moviment but just a little.
in the past i had bunnies with the same problem but only for 2 o 3 days not 3 weeks.
Generic veterinary said could be an infections to the kidneys so we gave him
trimetoprim sulfa (bactrim) in drops but nothing happened.
what you suggest i can do?
thanks in advance.
Anaotilia
 
Are you sure it's blood in the urine? Sometimes the urine is a little red from something they ate. It isn't necessarily something red they ate, because it's a chemical reaction.
 
yeah, carrots shouldn't be given daily.

red is one of the normal colors for a rabbit's urine to be... sometimes it's caused by stress or diet, but it usually doesn't mean there's anything wrong.

according to the HRS site:
Red urine is a descriptive term for the condition where a rabbit's urine varies in color from the normal pale yellow to dark yellow, carrot orange, brown, or bright red. Red urine is not a medical problem. The color usually returns to normal within one to three days, although I have had a couple of rabbits take three to four weeks before their urine returned to the pale yellow color.

For obscure reasons (my rabbits all eat the same food, drink the same water and get the same treats) some get red urine, some don't. Red urine (due to excessive urinary pigments) may occur due to any of the following:

  • While on antibiotics
  • At the first cold snap in the fall
  • After eating fir leaves
  • After eating carrots, spinach or other veggies containing beta carotene
 
The red in rabbit urine is due to a porphyrn dye that is often excreted... this dye seems to be dumped into the urine more often during times of stress than at other times, but is still not really considered to be abnormal. It is frequently misinterpreted as blood, but if you have seen blood in the urine of mammals and compare to the color of 'red' urine in rabbits, you will noticed that it is not really a blood color... a bit too orange-ish.. supposedly a black light will cause the porphyrin dye to glow if you have a black light available. Here at the clinic we just use urine sticks that measure the amount of blood in urine and no matter how red the urine is, they will still measure 0 for rabbit urine with dye in it.
 

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