Rabbit Health

Keeping your rabbit healthy is the goal of anyone taking care of rabbits.

Understanding the keys to bunny health helps!  This page will help provide that understanding, so you will know how best to take care of your rabbits.

Ventilation...
Sanitation...
Observation...

These are three of the most important factors of every-day disease control.

Plus, initial quarantine of new bunnies or adult rabbits added to your rabbitry or home will help prevent potentially catastrophic exposures.

Lastly, breed for health by NOT using sick animals in your breeding herd. These measures will help keep your rabbit healthy.

Ventilation

Ventilation helps keep the air in the rabbitry or barn clean.

Ventilation dilutes the concentration of microbes (of various types) and their byproducts in the environment, and for this reason is an extremely important factor in rabbit health.

Why Ammonia Odor is a Problem

The smell of ammonia in the rabbitry or barn is a clear indication health dangers lurk due to the presence of excessive ammonia.

Ammonia is created from bacterial action on a rabbit's urine. The rabbit excretes excess nitrogen if its feed is rich with protein. Bacteria then convert the nitrogen to ammonia, which serves to feed the bacteria. If your rabbitry smells of ammonia, perhaps the percentage of protein in the feed is a bit too high. Or, in pet rabbits, it may be time to change the rabbit's litter.

Ammonia fumes have long been implicated in lung inflammation, which opens the door to bacterial infection by Pasteurella multocida. In one study, there were no clinically significant effects at 57 ppm, however at 672 ppm, rabbits exhibited redness, discharge and corneal cloudiness.

Additionally, every animal in the study, including rabbits, either had areas of lung inflammation, or overall diffuse inflammation throughout the lungs as a direct result of excessive ammonia in the environment.

Every-day exposure to discernible ammonia levels may also reduce the movement of the cilia lining the airways (tiny waving hairs that disinfect the lungs by brushing secretions and debris toward the mouth). If the cilia slow down, the rabbit’s lungs can’t adequately clean themselves, and without cleansing and disinfection, it becomes easier for the rabbit or other animal to acquire infections or pneumonia.

Ammonia can quickly accumulate in enclosed spaces if ventilation is inadequate. Droppings and urine ‘ferment.’ Ammonia forms, and if the fumes have nowhere to go, ammonia levels can quickly rise, until the animal begins to really suffer.

The problems don’t stop with the lungs. Renal tubular calcification, bronchial epithelial calcification, renal tubular epithelial cell proliferation, myocardial fibrosis, and fatty changes in the liver occurred in several test subjects, both in dogs and rabbits. In a few control animals, similar problems were noted, however in the ammonia group, these conditions were marked, when they occurred.

Health damage from ammonia levels spans the gamut of animals, including humans. Governmental guidelines (OSHA) permit 50 parts per million (ppm) for no more than 8 hours of exposure a day.

Excessive ammonia exposure can be fatal to humans:

• 0-50 ppm -- Non-detectable to detectable but adverse effects unlikely
• 50-100 ppm -- Mild eye, nose, and throat irritation; may possibly develop a tolerance after 1-2 weeks with no subsequent adverse effects
• 140 ppm -- Moderate eye irritation; in exposures of less than 2 hours, no other long term problems
• 400 - 1700 ppm -- Symptoms worsen as ammonia levels rise: from moderate throat irritation to immediate eye injury, to directly caustic to airway, to throat spasms
• 2500-6500 ppm -- Fatal after half-hour exposure; sloughing and necrosis (death) of airway mucosa, chest pain, acute lung injury, deep lung spasms restricting ability to breathe
• 5000 ppm -- Rapidly fatal

Good ventilation keeps the ammonia levels down. If you open the door to your rabbitry and get hit with a dank wall of urine odor, your rabbits' lungs are burning as well.  Rabbit urine creates clouds of ammonia, which irritate the linings of the rabbits' lungs.  This creates wounds that positively invite infections such as pasteurella (snuffles). 

The best way to alleviate the ammonia is to remove waste materials regularly, and to ensure a minimum of about 15 air exchanges in an hour.  This can be accomplished with an exhaust fan that pulls the air out of the building, and creating an inlet of fresh cool air, usually near to the ground.

Sanitation

Sanitation is another method of keeping rabbit health strong. 

Sanitation?  Simple - just keep the cages clean. A single rabbit hair can carry thousands of bacteria or viruses.  This doesn't need to frighten you...it’s the job of the animal’s immune system to keep it healthy and protected from illness. It's worked all these years. 

But, wild rabbits can manage their own environment.  Once you confine the rabbit to a cage, it needs you to help them keep the cage clean.

This isn't to say you must sterilize the entire barn.  It just means keep the cage clean - to reduce the numbers of germs the rabbit comes in contact with. 

This one factor alone can be the determining factor for whether or not the animal catches a rabbit illness. 

Suppose your rabbit sniffs one of those stray hairs and gets 1,052 germs in his nose.  There’s a great chance the immune system will kill the germs and the rabbit will stay healthy.  But if the rabbit sticks his nose into a million germs all at once, say, a build-up of feces in a cage corner, well, his immune system might call up all the troops, and still lose the battle. 

Sanitation evens the playing field and gives your rabbit a chance to stay healthy by keeping the numbers of enemy germs to a minimum.

Observation

Observation is another important key to rabbit health.

Pay attention every day to how your rabbit is acting, and how it might be feeling.  Even at Aurora Rex Rabbit Ranch, where we have close to 50 adult rabbits, it takes just a few minutes to say ‘hello’ to each rabbit, observe their demeanor and behavior, and open the cages and interact with the rabbits. 

We observe that the rabbit’s water valve is working well, that its droppings are round and solid and normally formed, and that the rabbit is bright-eyed and energetic. 

I know which rabbits spin around the cage three times in their eagerness to say hello.  I know which are normally a little more timid.

The chinchilla Rex rabbit pictured here is hunkered in the corner of her cage. But she's my best friend when I come with the food cart. Look how well-conditioned she is.  No worries there.

When rabbits start feeling not-so-hot, it's not like they make a general announcement. But you can see it in other ways: They quit eating or drinking.  They might sit hunched up, as though their belly or their feet were in pain. They might have a hanging head or dull eyes. 

If you can catch the problem before those million germs have turned themselves into a billion and completely overwhelmed the rabbit's immune system, you might yet win the rabbit health battle.  Go to our Rabbit Diseases page if you have any current rabbit health concerns.

Note: Karen's book, Rabbit Raising Problem Solver, published by Storey Publishing, has a massive section on "Health Care for Rabbits," pages 217 to 301. Purchase it in the Raising-Rabbits Store, or at Amazon! (ad)

Also Note: We at Raising-Rabbits.com are NOT veterinarians, and nothing said on these pages should be taken as a substitute for professional veterinarian care, should you need it.  We are speaking out of many years of experience, but we truly don't know for sure what specific problems your rabbit might be experiencing. We hope you can profit from our experience, but please don't delay to seek professional rabbit health care if necessary.

Quarantine

There’s a couple reasons why you might want to place a rabbit under quarantine:

• If you’ve just gotten a new rabbit and you’re not sure about its health
• You’ve taken some rabbits to a rabbit show where they were around hundreds of other rabbits.  And especially if several rabbits in your breed were removed from the show table for having pasteurellosis (evidenced by a purulent nasal discharge - white snot).

Quarantine means to house the rabbit well apart from your other rabbits. It also means to take care of all your healthy animals first, saving the sick ones for last. Don't return to care for the well rabbits until you've changed your clothes and washed your hands well.

Quarantine shouldn't need to last more than two to four weeks.  We have several cages set up outside our main ‘barn’ area.  Any rabbits who have questionable health get moved to these cages.  We’re happy to report that these cages are mainly empty most of the time.  This is what happens when rabbit health is a focus of selective breeding, and will be true of your rabbit herd too.

Another method of quarantining that isn't as secure is to simply put barriers around a rabbit cage.  You could call this a rabbit isolation cage, and we have quite a few of them at Aurora Rex Rabbits.  We hang clear plastic panels on both sides of the cage.  The back of the cage is quite close to the barn canopy, and the top of the cage usually has hay or a wooden panel laying over the cage.  This helps stop the spread of germs through means of droplets, and has worked quite well for us.

Catch symptoms and implement quarantine measures early, and you may just save the life of your rabbit and the lives of its herd-mates.

Always Breed with Rabbit Health in Mind

Sick animals don't help anyone.  They just drain the money out of your wallet, and out of the wallets of anyone unfortunate enough to mistakenly acquire a sick rabbit. 

Don’t use ANY sick or unthrifty animals in your breeding program, no matter how attractive they may seem.  By following this guideline carefully ourselves, we developed an entire herd of rabbits that are healthy all the time.

There's another big reason is this important. There are a few rabbit illnesses that are virtually incurable. 

BUT: if your rabbit's immune system is genetically strong, and with attention to ventilation, sanitation, observation, and quarantine as necessary, chances are the vast majority of your rabbits will remain healthy into old age. 

Merck Veterinary Manual has some good rabbit health info.