Rabbit cleaning

Question
We have a wonderful dwarf rabbit that is over a year old and neutered.  He broke his back leg last summer and due to great medical care he had surgery and is able to hop around and seems pain free and happy.  Our problem seems to be that for the last couple of weeks he has started collecting poop in his fur as if he is backing up/sitting while going poop and then it sticks to his fur and genital area.  How do I best clean him?  I believe it is due to his injury, it was a high leg break requiring pins and although he can use his leg to hop around, he can't lift it as well as the other leg nor does he jump up.  I have been told that rabbits stink after a bath and I don't know how best to proceed.  Thank you!

Answer
Hi Christine,

very glad to hear your guy came through the leg surgery well.  Always nice to hear a success story of rabbits and mended legs.  It is very delicate work, with their bones being more fragile (and in your case, physically smaller).

I would not recommend bathing him by dipping into water unless it was an emergency.  I don't believe this is the case here.  It is extremely traumatic for most rabbits to have any part of them in water.

Generally speaking, 'messy butt' as you are describing is a textbook symptom and usually the first symptom people notice when their rabbit is overweight.  I would gather that his food/treat intake has stayed the same since the leg injury, but his mobility has not.  I do not believe the accident/leg problem is now causing him not to be able to get back there, as he has been able to except just for the last two weeks.  He probably has gotten overweight enough to both not need to eat all of his cecal pellets and may now have difficulty doing so because he is carrying more weight and is less able to bend to get them.

If you have a checkup coming up, I'd get them to weigh him there and ask the vet if he appears overweight, and note the behavior of missing cecals and messy butt.

You can weigh him at home, and compare his current weight to prior weights and confirm if he is bigger.  A half pound or more on a dwarf rabbit is a large amount of weight to gain, and can impact movement and bending.

You can also look at his shape from above, tail facing your knees.  The shoulders and midsection should be thinner and then curve out around the back legs.  Think of a pear shape.  That is not an overweight rabbit.  If the shoulders are thick and he resembles more of a sausage with little or no difference in width between shoulders and back legs, he probably is overweight.  

You can always also compare earlier pictures of him, if they are profile shots or shots where you can see him from the top.  Generally it is a buildup of excess fat in the upper abdomen and shoulder areas that make it difficult for them to eat their cecals.

To prevent this:  adjust the diet.  Greatly reduce high-carb treats.  Eliminate any treats that add sugar in to them.  Greatly reduce carrots.  You can keep greens the same.  Reduce pellets by half.  If he is on an alfalfa-based pellet, switch him to a timothy-based pellet.  If you are feeding him pellets with extra junk in them like seeds, corn, and fruit, gradually over 6 weeks switch him over to an all-pellet feed such as Oxbow Bunny Basics T (T for Timothy hay).  American Pet Diner also has a good timothy pellet.  I just mention these two because in my experience rabbits have preferred these two pellets over others.  IF he gets treats that are high calorie now, start switching the treats to better things like an extra piece of lettuce, or parsley.

By changing his diet this way, you will reduce his intake of unneeded calories, and it will also encourage him to eat all of his cecal pellets instead of ignoring some.  These will become more appealing (they smell sweet to rabbits) when high-sugar, high-carb treats and pellets are cut back.  He will start to lose a little weight and gain more flexibility to eat his cecals as well.

Second, give him more exercise time.  He needs to be burning more calories and it will help him to use the leg.  

To clean him in his current condition:  you will need a lightly damp warm washcloth, a man's comb and a scissors with blunt tips.  You will want to try to basically lightly wet the matted areas to make the cecals more pliable so that you can comb the big parts out.  Do not scrape your rabbits' skin with the comb teeth - you'll want to make sure the teeth tips are smooth (an old used comb may be better for this).  So you can alternate between wetting the bigger mats with the hand towel, then combing out what you can.  You may be able to pull some of it off with the hand holding the hand towel.  If the mat will not come out/off, you may have to trim that fur out.  Use your fingers as a barrier between the scissors and his skin (you don't want to cut the very thin skin of your rabbit), like a barber or stylist does when they cut a section of hair, and don't worry about removing the fur up to the skin, take what you can without having to get real close to the skin.  

Clean off the hand towel periodically (keep a trash bucket handy and rinse it out when needed during cleaning.  Just squeeze most of the water out of the towel so that it is only very lightly damp.

You can do this cleaning from a tranced, on his back position if he is able to be tranced by you.  Otherwise you can do this with him sitting in your lap on towels or a pillow covered with a towel, and one person holding him, and the other cleaning the back area.  I would not recommend trimming his fur in this position unless it is easily accessible from behind and can be isolated between fingers.  It is better to trim him upside down.

Now if you find you can't do it either way, schedule a vet appointment, and discuss the whole diet/weight thing after they trim and clean him up.

And I don't know who told you rabbits stink after a bath.  Rabbits never really need a water bath because rabbits, unlike people and dogs, for ex., do not have sweat glands to make any kind of body odor.  The only odors they may emit are through two small scent glands on either side of their vent area.  They sometimes coat their fecal pellets with this smell when they mark teritory and such.  In intact rabbits you probably will pick up that smell, and sometimes you may smell it with fixed rabbits, but they really have no natural odor because they don't secrete oils.

So basically, DON'T get your rabbit wet.  A lightly damp washcloth in that area to loosen up and comb out matted cecal material, worked by hand.  It doesn't have to be 100% cleaned up, you will have gotten the area to a point where your rabbits' normal cleaning of himself down there can take care of small areas you may not have been able to fully get.  You will have turned something unmanageable into something manageable for him.

And start putting him onto a lower-octane diet or he will continue to have this problem.  

I would also discuss with your vet using some joint and bone supplements with your boy due to his leg.  Especially glucosamine and MSM (methylsufonylmethane, a natural form of sulphur) which help rebuild joints and reduce pain.  These are two wonderful items that help out a lot of people and other animals that have joint problems and pain.

Lee