bunny - reddish soiling

Question
Hello!  Lately our bunny has been leaving reddish spots about the size of one or two quarters on the rug where she takes a nap in the afternoon.  Sometimes there is additional soiling on her tail which wipes off easily.  This doesn't happen every day, more like every few days.

Her behavior has been normal as far as I'm concerned, but my husband thinks she's lying on her stomach more than usual and isn't as hyper as before.  I've noticed she's a bit gassy, but she still eats like a horse, produces normal-sized fecals, binks and runs to greet me.  She still gets excited when I say her name over and over and starts bouncing around.  She seems all right to me.

I've already taken her to a vet once (not her usual vet because of the holidays) and an ultrasound showed nothing unusual.  Her bladder was too small to extract a urine sample, but I'm not so sure this is a urinary problem anyway.  The vet suggested she may just be in heat because her nipples looked a bit prominent, but that was over a week ago.  Wouldn't that have stopped by now?

(As an aside, we plan to get her neutered this year.  When we rescued her this past summer she was severely underweight and malnourished, so we had to put it off.)

Tonight my husband noticed a mushy fecal pellet and was freaking out about it.  Her others are normal and she's still acting normal.  There's a new reddish-orange stain in her favorite sleeping spot, too.  I'm hugely busy at work right now and can't conveniently take the bunny to her regular vet before Friday.  I'll go to any inconvenience to take her earlier if this is a serious matter because I love her desperately, but since she saw an exotics vet just last week and was pronounced okay, I'm hesitant.

What could this be?  And is it serious enough that I should make a trip to the vet top priority?  Any information would be helpful, both for my bunny and for my sanity-- my husband is driving me crazy poking around in her litterbox all the time!

Answer
Dear Ann,

You and your husband are correct to be concerned about this.  It's not normal for her to be leaving reddish spots where she lies.  If they are urine spots, then this could indicate that she might have a bladder stone, bladder sludge, or a urinary tract infection.  A urine culture and sensitivity test would reveal what's going on, and you can read more about this here:

www.bio.miami.edu/hare/urinary.html

Urinary tract problems are usually painful, and this could explain why she's a little more lethargic than normal (which is *always* a symptom to heed, since rabbits tend to hide their illness until they are *very* sick).  The mushy cecotrope is another sign that something is amiss, as you can read here:

www.bio.miami.edu/hare/poop.html

An even more common cause of red "spotting" in unspayed females, though, is uterine hyperplasia (pre-cancer) or cancer.  Still, this isn't a reason to panic.  The good news is that even if she does have uterine adenocarcinoma (by far the most common type of cancer in female rabbits), spaying will almost always solve the problem, as the cancer doesn't seem to be highly metastatic if caught early.

I'm a little concerned that the one vet thought she might be "in heat" because of her swollen nipples. Rabbits do not go into heat cycles as dogs and cats do (I suspect this vet is primarily a dog/cat vet?). They are induced ovulators, ovulating when they mate.  They don't come into season and "swell up" the way your vet seems to think they do.

To be sure you have a really good rabbit vet checking on your dear bunny, please use the list linked here:

www.rabbit.org/vets

to find a good rabbit vet in your area.  I would waste no time in having her spayed, but it would be wise to check for urinary tract infection first, since any infection would make her a poorer candidate for surgery than if she were completely healthy.

I hope this helps get you started.  Please write back if you have any other questions.

Dana