Tragic

[Linda]

Hi guys! I am new on this site. I want to share my tragic experience here with you. I had a bunny for almost 2 years. He was our little angel, so friendly and so good bunny. 3 days ago me and my boyfriend decided to wash him because he was dirty from poop and we wanted him to be cleaned. We washed him before, this wasnt his first bath. I kept him and my boyfriend washed him but my little bunny tried to escape, he didnt like, he was scared but i still kept him. We used the towel to dry him a bit. After bath he was ok he jumped in room he seemed normal. Like 4 hours later-or more- we went sleep. The bunny seemed good just he looked a bit upset on us for washing him. Wow and the next morning i woke up and my little baby was paralysed. He couldnt move, it was like he was dead but we checked on him and he was breathing. We went fast to a vet with him but the vet couldnt tell us what happened, what could be the reason of it so he gave him 3 injections and told us to come tonight to see how these injections work on it. My little baby started to move a bit his legs and i had hope that he is getting better. But after 2-3 hours he died. My little angel died. He breath hard for like 15 seconds and then he stopped. I cant stop thinking about that bath, i feel like i am a monster, he was my little angel, my baby. I am not sure exactly what happened, there are many things in my mind. It was maybe the fact that he was stressed and he had a stroke or maybe the injections were not so good for him. Sadly this vet wasnt so good but i realised it too late. A girl told me that she had a bunny and he paralysed after a bath because it was cold and he got a flu and after one week he recovered. The place is so empty without my baby. I still come home and search for him in rooms and expect him to come, to jump near me and look at me with his little eyes. Do you have any idea of what happened? I would never mean to hurt him. I feel so bad, so guilty. I love him so much. It was a healthy bunny, never had problems.

[Bam]

I’m very sorry you lost your bunny. As you know, rabbits should never be given full baths, but if a rabbit has a dirty butt, it’s quite fine to give a butt bath. I have done that innumerable times with my poopy-butt-prone rabbit, and there was never a problem. Maybe what caused the poopy butt in your bun also caused the hind leg paralysis. There is a rabbit condition called e cuniculi that can manifest in several ways, both with tummy- or urinary problems and hind leg paralysis or head tilt.

It’s not possible to say if the injections your bun received could have made matters worse. First of all I can only guess what the injections were. My guess would be antibiotics, a painkiller and corticosteroids. Corticosteroids is standard treatment for cats and dogs and humans, but should be used with great caution in rabbits. Sometimes it is given as a last resort to a bun severely affected by the e. cuniculi I mentioned above, so your vet could have made the call that your bun’s condition warranted corticosteroids. I’m very sorry it didn’t save your rabbit. It’s very hard to lose a bunny.

You did right by him when you took him to the vet. Trying to treat this at home without seeing a vet first would not have been responsible. You were being good owners.

[Linda]

Thank you for your answer we were not good owners. I feel so bad because i forced him to be washed. Itwas a butt bath, we just washed his butt and behind legs but he tried to escape, he didnt like this and we still kept him. I feel like we are criminals, how we could do this to our bunny? I didnt think he wd paralyse or die. I didnt think he wd be so stressed because of this. About the injections, doctor said it s like an antibiotic for him, you are right. The thing that broke my heart in smaller pieces was that after my little angel died, we went to vet to let him there and they said that they do not deal with bunnies. How they could say this to us just now? If he wd tell me before i would just go to other vet. I dont know what killed my little bunny if it was the stress from that bath or those injections, i dont know if the right vet could save my bunny. I think about him every moment of day.

[Sarita]

I’m so sorry for your loss. While it is not recommended to wash your rabbit I really don’t believe this is the cause of his death or the condition – I feel like it was just a coincidence. I am unsure what type of injections your vet gave so I cannot speak to that.

But you did the right thing by getting him vet care. I understand why you feel sad, but you should not feel responsible for the outcome of this. You were good owners and washing him was not a bad thing…your intentions were good.

There had to be an underlying condition that you were not aware of. Rabbits are good at hiding illness (very good).

You take care of yourself and realize you are not to blame. But go ahead and be sad because he’s gone…you have to grieve.

[earlygirl]

Linda, I’m so sorry you lost your baby As pet parents it’s so hard to know if we did the best we could and made the right decisions when things like this happen.

Try not to be hard on yourself about the bath… you did the bath because he needed it and because you had done it before without any issues. And you brought him to the vet which is the right thing to do. I’m just so sorry the vet wasn’t upfront with you about his experience with rabbits.

It sounds like you loved your angel very much, and I’m sure you made life great for him! <3

[Bam]

Like I said before, I have given butt baths so many times, and my bun did NOT like it the first 50 times or so. You give a butt bath when a bun has poopy butt, you can’t let a bun have sticky poop on his rear, it can result in fecal burns if you don’t remove the poop. So giving a butt bath is good ownership. There is a slight possibility that you hurt his back during the butt bath if he struggled, but if he’d broken his back he’d not have hopped off after the bath. To me it seems like the poopy butt was a first symptom of something much worse. This is not always the case with poopy butt, some buns are prone to poopy butt and can have it on and off all their lives (like my bun did), but it can be. Especially if this was the first time he had poopy butt after you had had him for 2 years.

Most vets are not rabbit savvy because rabbits are classified as exotic animals. Exotics vets have special training, “normal” vets only have the basic understanding of rabbits. Antibiotics are generally safe if given as injections – the unsafe ones as a rule cause death from fatal enteritis i.e. severe diarrhea from good gut bacteria being eradicated and bad bacteria taking over. This you would have seen.

It is very hard to lose a bunny and the first thing our brain does is to start accusing us. That doesn’t mean our self-accusations have merit. Maybe it’s a protective reflex to distract us from the intense pain of losing someone very dear to us. Many of us here have had to go through this, some of us are going through it right now. If you like to, you can post about him in our Rainbow Bridge section, maybe with a picture or two, to celebrate his life by letting everybody know what a lovely rabbit he was. If he was your angel for two years and the house feels empty and you’re still looking for him, there’s no way you weren’t good owners. You didn’t give him a butt bath for the fun of it, you did it because he needed it and you cared about him. Please believe me when I say this.

[Linda]

Thank you guys i blame myself because i feel it, i forced him much and he was scared. I didnt realise this, i was hard on him, i should never force him with this bath if he didnt want or take him much much slowly. Just my little bunny knew what he felt those moments. I belive that the stress and fear caused a stroke and this is why he paralysed in morning wow i wd never think..

[LittlePuffyTail]

I’m so very sorry. I know it’s hard not to blame yourself. But you were doing what you thought was right at the time.

I used to give my bunny bum baths all the time and he hated it but we never had problems.

[Author]

Messages