black mini rex baby

Question
Hi,
I just bought a black baby mini rex. She is about seven weeks old. All of her poop has looked normal, except for this clump that was wet, but i could see little balls. They were just really smelly and all bunched together. Not even that loose, but I was kind of worried. Would you know what it is?

Answer
Hi Erin,

No need to worry hun these are totally normal and are called night poop or cecal pellets. Rabbits produce two kind of waste pellets - fecal and cecal.  Fecal pellets are waste and look like little marbles.  They are mostly undigestible fiber remains (excellent fertilizer).  The cecal pellets are smaller, wetter and look like a little cluster of grapes.  These pellets are re-ingested and broken down to extract more nutrients out of them.  Rabbits produce them at various times of the day, don't worry if you don't see him/her eating them as they do this fairly quickly and sometimes it looks like they are cleaning themselves. The rabbit should be dropping fecal pellets everyday in a decent (noticeable) quantity.  Which brings up the next question, what are you feeding him?

Rabbits need hay over anything else.  Timothy hay to be exact.  Any pet supply store stocks this, and good brands to look for are Oxbow Timothy hay and/or Kaytee Timothy hay.  Hay is more important than any other thing you can give them.  It pushes hair through their system so it doesn't form a blockage, and it wears their ever-growing teeth down because of how they have to chew it. You can supplement the hay with small amounts of rabbit food pellets, that are timothy hay as well.  Oxbow makes a great timothy pellet, Bunny Basics T. No more than one quarter cup a day per 5 pounds body weight. You can give small quantities of greens, I would go very slowly introducing new greens to them as their gut needs to adjust for a couple of weeks anytime you give them a new food.  Their GI tract is much different than ours, or cats and dogs. Good, easy to find greens I use are green leaf lettuce, romaine lettuce (NEVER ICEBERG), and Italian parsley. For now, stay away from any treats that have sugar or are high in carbohydrates (like oats, etc).  These have to be given in extremely limited quantities so that their gut doesn't have a problem. The House Rabbit Society web site has excellent articles on rabbit nutrition.

www.rabbit.org

Just do a search on 'nutrition' and a number of article links will show up.  Write back anytime