I’ve decided to post about when Nico became very seriously ill 3 years ago because of e. cuniculi and the lucky escape we had. I’m doing this in the hopes of educating anyone out there who doesn’t already know about it.
We got Nico neutered within a month of adopting him, and since then he’d never peed anywhere other than his toilet, so when he started peeing all over the floor 6 months later, we were mildly concerned. Within a week he started to smell bad so we picked him up and looked underneath him and discovered that his back end was slightly matted with poop and wee. This is when we took him to the vets even though we still weren’t too concerned about him.
Luckily for us and Nico, we chanced upon probably the only vet in a 20 mile radius who could be considered something of an expert on rabbits. We told her about the peeing and the matted fur and she recognised it immediately as symptoms of e. cuniculi. The incontinence was due to his kidneys being affected by the parasite, and the matted fur was caused by him being unable to clean himself due to a lack of balance because the parasite was affecting his brain. She gave us Panacur and antibiotics and asked us to bring him back twice that first week.
Even with the medicine being administered, he was losing weight and fur in patches over the first week and we were all incredibly concerned until the medicines finally started to kick in. It was only through the constant weigh ins and vet visits that I even noticed him getting better, his recovery was so incremental.
His balance was awful for months and I don’t think he’s ever fully recovered from it, and this has caused us further complications with his lack of self grooming when it comes to his eyes and his butt in shedding seasons. He hates being handled, so hates when we do the grooming for him. (We got Cola, in part, in the hopes that she’d groom him. She only ever cleans his already clean parts, but you know what they say about the best laid plans...)
He also hates when it’s time to re-administer the medicine every 6 months to stop him getting e. cuniculi again, but it has to be done because we were so close to losing him that first time. Now we know what an awful, life-ending thing it is for a rabbit to contract.
Honestly, my plea to all rabbit owners is to educate yourself on e. cuniculi. The symptoms include lack of balance, sudden incontinence, head tilt, cataracts, weakening of the back legs and neck spasms.
I’m not a vet, so anyone out there should weigh in if I’m wrong but I don’t think Panacur is harmful to a rabbit that doesn’t have e. cuniculi, so if you’re ever in the slightest doubt that your rabbit may have e. cuniculi then you can buy Panacur (the one specifically for rabbits) online and administer it to your bun.
Cola has never shown any symptoms but because we know Nico has had it in the past (and it’s unclear to me as to whether a rabbit is ever fully ‘cured’ of e. cuniculi) we treat them both every 6 months.
Sorry for the long post but I feel this is very important. We knew nothing about e. cuniculi when we first got a rabbit and it’s only through us being anxious people that we took him to the vets even though we’d convinced ourselves it was nothing serious. Here’s a video of Nico’s poor balance to illustrate my point.
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