Meco has been with us for about a month now and she’s a pretty well adjusted bunny for the experience.  We’re falling into our little routine and she’s giving us a little sass when we mess with it. 

Last night, I was making macarons and salted butter caramel and while I was whisking in the heavy cream and butter (metal pan + wire whisk + boiling sugar + heavy cream = loud, strange sound) the rabbit got scared.  We were distracted, having a conversation about something else and looked around to find her hiding under the kitchen table (a place she only goes when she’s nervous) surrounded in pellets.  She jumped when she realized we were looking at her and bolted around the living room.

Needless to say, as soon as everything was combined, I stopped whisking and we spent the next half hour speaking softy and (from very, very far away) talking directly to her (she gets that whenever we say “bunny” we obviously mean her.)  After a while, she calmed down.  She was still jumpy a bit but she would let us pet her and she would hang out by our feet rather than running away from us.

Once she was calm, we dust bustered up her accident and realized that she’d had a wet componant to it….the consistency of wet coffee grounds, against the baseboard.

i got nervous but when she went into her cage for the evening, she seemed to be dropping solid pellets, so I asked the boy (who is home all day) if he would keep an eye on her and he has been.  About an hour ago, she had more solid pellets accompanied by the same tiny amount of “wet coffee grounds” which I can only assume must be a really wet cecal.

Her stress level shouldn’t have increased recently and we had her into the vet about a week and a half ago.  She gets a high-fiber, low-protien rabbit pellet – exactly two ounces a day…one in the morning, one in the evening (12 hours apart) about a cup and a half of greens (right now, romaine and butter lettuces) along with a slice or two of green peper and a baby carrot, sliced.  She has tons and tons of hay (we use it as litter material because she actually kicks the carefresh out.) There have, however, been two changes to her diet in the last few days.  The first of which is I made apple and sausage stuffing last night and I gave her the “ends” of a green apple – four in all…the slices were a little thicker than a piece of paper and it wasn’t much. She ate all four of them…  (We don’t usually give her treats…pieces of her nightly salad, sure, but not extra’s that we wouldn’t have already included.)  She’s also gotten two…maybe three…bite sized tostito’s in the last three days.  (She found a chunk of one on the floor and gobbled it up…and i’ve read that some people give their rabbits saltine crackers as snacks…so I didn’t stop the boyfriend from giving her little pieces to bribe her into her cage the last couple of days…but we’re talking a quarter of a chip here, a quarter of a chip there and the sum total of it can’t have been more than two or three chips.)

I know rabbits need to eat their cecal material because it’s part of their digestive process, so I’m concerned that she’s not getting that nutrition right now and I want to get the problem reigned in.

Her behaviour, by the way – has been totally normal.  Except for last night’s jumpy, panic, she’s been completely normal all day.