Swollen face and white pus on eye

Question

Bugsay   My pig is about 7 yo. Recently we found a baby bunny and places it into our pigs cage for a day before I decided not to keep the wild bunny. A few days later my pig started forming a swollen face on the right.  At first I thought it was food but it started getting bigger and now it's his entire right side down to his chin  and today I spotted this white pus forming around his lower eye. The swollen neck has a small pink pigment in the middle as well.  What is it?

Answer
Your pig has an abscess on his face. It may or may not be related to the baby bunny as they get these occasionally, usually from having scratched themselves with their own dirty toenails. Sometimes the scratching causes a break in the skin and a staph infection develops.

That swelling is soft and feels like a water balloon. That's because it is filled with pus. Sometimes they break on their own, but typically these abscesses need to be opened and drained.

I've done dozens of these over the years, but because of my medical background I am comfortable doing this procedure. You are probably going to have to take him to a vet, unless you know someone that is capable of opening this abscess so it can drain.

It can't just be poked with a large needle as it would quickly close up again and the pus would continue to fill up. The fluid inside is very foul and smelly, almost a rotten odor. That's typical of staph.

Staph is a normal bacteria that is present on just about any skin. When a break in the skin occurs, if there is additional contaminates on the skin such as the poo from the cage that gets trapped into their nails, that scratch becomes a perfect medium for growth of the staphylococcus areus (aka staph) bacteria to grow wildly and cause an abscess. The small cut closes over and the bacteria is then in a 'greenhouse' environment. It's warm, moist and full of additional bacteria that is just waiting for the chance to go wild.

When these abscesses are lanced they need to be kept open so the continual pus developing will drain out as the wound heals from the inside out.

Just for future reference, you may not want to put a wild bunny in the cage with a guinea pig. Because of their wild odor, guinea pigs usually will attack the baby and often kill them. Wild rabbits also carry parasites that you may not want to expose your pig to.

It's unlikely they got into a fight and that caused this wound. The pig outweighs a baby bunny and I wouldn't think that little bunny could have gotten close enough to have caused a wound on your pig's jaw. This is probably just a coincidence.

The white discharge in the eye is a stress reaction to the abscess that is so close to it.