The photo angle is a little hard to tell whether it’s a dewlap or not.

The most obvious way to tell if it’s male is by seeing if it has testicles, though if the bunny is young, the testes may not have dropped yet. Also sometimes they “suck” em up so you have to “pry” and check the area slightly above their tail (both left and right side) to see if there are testes there.

For females, yes a spay is riskier than a neuter because it’s more invasive (the vet has to cut the bunny open and take out the uterus). Spaying a female is vital because they have a high chance of contracting uterine cancer once they are older. If this is done by a bunny savvy vet who has a lot of successful bunny spays, then it’s most likely gonna be okay. Every surgery comes with a risk though and it also depends on how well the individual bun tolerates it.

It’s terrible that the owner did all those things – obviously they know nothing about bunnies

It is notoriously hard to tell with young buns. Even vets get mistaken sometimes. We have had had plenty of cases here on the forums. Bun owners suddenly discover weird pink growths on their little girl bun’s lower belly. It can look really worrying, because bun testicles don’t look quite like for example dog testicles, and they are placed differently too. It’s worse when people get two girl buns and only discover one of them is a boy when the other one has a litter =( Most other pets, can be sexed at a very young age, so it wasn’t your fault you thought the guy selling Cloudy knew what he was doing.

A dewlap is a feature mostly seen in sexually mature girl buns or in fat rabbits of either sex. So the presence of a dewlap-like bulge in a very young bun isn’t a reliable way to determine sex.

Buns can eat bird seeds if they have to. But it’s not good for them. Hay and grass is the best food, and pellets should be plain pellets. I don’t know if you can get plain rabbit pellets in Iraq. Maybe you could order online?

I do understand it’s a challenge to be a bun owner in a country where buns aren’t common as pets. It can be a challenge anyway, because rabbits are classified as exotic pets and it can be hard to find an exotics vet anywhere. The best thing would be if you could find a vet who is open to suggestions from you. Not all vets are, so you have to tread very carefully, of course. And you’ll have to read up on things and ask questions on forums like this one, and find suitable treatment protocols and look up safe drugs etc so you can make informed suggestions to the vet. It’s obviously not ideal, it’s a gazillion times better to have access to a really rabbit savvy vet that has all the proper rabbit care equipment. But that is still a luxury in most places, to be honest.

We’ll be very happy to try and help you. It’s what these forums are for. There’s lots of fun stuff here, picture threads and chat threads etc, but our main objective is to help bun owners and buns find solutions to bun problems.

Hi there!

Its sad how pet stores (and most people) are so uneducated on basic needs of animals. But, you seem like you have done great research on your baby and the needs of it
I got my first bunny from a pet store ( I know bad idea, i should have adopted but she was so scared) and they said she was a dwarf- she is 10 pounds now so they don’t know what they are talking about.

Bam and kurottabun are correct, its to hard to sex that early, I know for me if you look at the hole they pee out of, if you gently (while holding them) take two fingers around the hole and push in, if you see something poke out, its a boy, if nothing, its a girl.

If you get him/her fixed-which we all recommend, maybe your vet can do research on what anesthesia and medicine is safe for it for surgery. They should be able to reach out to the nearest vet school to get help, and heck, it might help more bunny owners like you get the vet care you need because you asked them to learn more about bunnies.

How old is Cloudy now? If you can get a picture of what “pops out”, we can vote on whether we think it’s a boy or a girl. It’s difficult to tell when they are young, but it does become easier to tell as they get older and start to mature. Of course, if you find testicles then there would be no mistake. LOL