Please bear with me if this is long but I don’t want to miss any details out.
We have a bunny who we rescued aged about 1 year old. He’d come from a pretty poor living environment & had never been given hay. When he got to us we tried everything we could to get him to eat it, but he would have literally starved himself to death rather than eat any of the hundreds of varieties we tried. On the advice of our vet we eventually moved to high fibre pellets & veggies & GI wise this seemed to suit him, he’s always been a healthy weight & never had a sniff of digestive issues.
It did however cause problems with his teeth, & we’ve had to take him regularly for burrs, but he’s never needed to be put under for these & they don’t phase him.
He also then got an abscess, which ended up being osteomyelitis. He had surgery & recovered well. The wound was left open. He’s had a couple of minor recurrences of infection since, but we clean the opening regularly & with the dentals he’s had no real problems.
Now a week ago he was due a routine dental so we made the appointment but our usual vet had left the practise. Because we’ve always had total confidence in everyone in the surgery we agreed to have him seen by a different vet.
When he came home from the vets he seemed fine but about 48 hours later he started to seem a little out of sorts. Then he got a bit funny about eating his veggies, but to be fair he can be a bit like that, so we just got a variety of other things to tempt him & he started eating again. Then yesterday he completely stopped eating anything & spent most of the day resting the side of his face (previous abscess side) on the floor, or up against anything cool he could find. It’s blatantly obvious that he’s in serious pain with his mouth.
Our suspicion is that something happened during the dental that has led to this pain. We took him to the vets first thing today, but they are now telling us they won’t even look at his teeth until he’s eating & pooping again. Problem is this seems a bit catch 22 as it’s very obviously the mouth pain that’s stopping him eating. He still shows an interest in his favourite herbs, but then when it comes to trying to open his mouth to get them in he just can’t.
We’ve managed to syringe feed him critical care about 100mls over the course of the day & given him water via syringe regularly, but no poops yet. I’ve done a few belly massages & it’s lovely & soft, really doesn’t feel like he has gas, I’m convinced the issue is mouth pain, not gastric problems if that makes sense?
My questions are, any ideas what could have happened during the dental to cause this? & anything else we could be doing to help him eat? It feels like we are in an impossible situation where he’s just suffering.
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