Lop rabbit died during neuter surgery

Question
Hi Dana,

My Holland Lop rabbit was neutered today at my local vet. He was supposed to come home tonight but they called and told me that they wanted to keep him for observation due to a little bleeding.

I called the vet back to find out how he was a few hours later and they told me he died, that "he must have been a bleeder". They said they don't use stitches on this type of surgery, they leave the incision open. Do you think the incision should have been stitched?

I wonder if the vet could have cut an artery that caused the bleeding.

Thank you for taking your time in answering my questions.

Shari


Answer
Dear Shari,

I am so very sorry about the tragic loss of your friend.

The delay in answering was because I wanted to run this by several of my best rabbit experts and rabbit vets to make sure my first instincts about this weren't too off base.  I don't think they were.

Although a couple of people wrote back to me and said they knew vets who did scrotal neuters without suturing or gluing them back up (leaving it open is said to prevent hematoma, or blood filling the scrotum), all the best rabbit vets I know do not do the procedure this way, which is more typical of the way a cat is neutered.

If a scrotal neuter is done on a rabbit, it is wise to close the inguinal canal, which is rather large in the rabbit, since the intestines can herniate out of the canal if it is left open.  It doesn't happen often, but why take the chance?

A few of the people who said their vets did rabbit neuters as it was done on your rabbit said that occasionally a rabbit would bleed, but that close, careful monitoring of the rabbit by hospital staff post-op should catch a problem like this before it became fatal.  It sounds as if this was not done at the hospital where you took your bunny.

In all the rabbit neuters I have witnessed (and that's a LOT), I have *never* seen excessive bleeding.  Our experienced rabbit vets use a procedure called a "pre-scrotal" neuter.  Since the rabbit scrotum wraps around in front of the pre-puce, a small incision in the front of the scrotum (NOT into the abdomen!) allows the vet to pull the testicles out, tie everything off completely (and either closing or leaving open the tunic in which the testicles were housed, which has nothing to do with closing the scrotum), and then neatly suture a small incision site just in front of the pre-puce.  There is practically no bleeding, and if things are properly tied off, there should be none.

If a ligature pops off, one would hope that the staff would be monitoring the situation closely enough to notice that a rabbit was *bleeding*, especially if the scrotal incision was left open.  If any of our vets had let a rabbit die this way, we would consider them negligent.

I did not witness this surgery, of course, nor any of the following post-op care.  But this does not sound like an unavoidable death to me.  One would hope that the bunny would have been closely monitored for any sign of bleeding so that this could be repaired immediately if it were noticed.  Evidently, it was not noticed until it was too late.

I know this comes too late for your dear friend, but if you ever have another rabbit, I would NOT go back to that vet.  Please use the list linked here to find a rabbit-savvy vet whose staff is more vigilant and more up-to-date on commonly used rabbit surgical procedures.

www.rabbit.org/vets

I am sorry.

Sincerely,

Dana