About 3 weeks ago, after coming back from a vacation, one of our dwarf hotots (the male, who is the only one of the two who ever gets sick), got really sick. The sickest I’ve ever seen him – he wasn’t eating, he was incredibly lethargic, and we were fearing the worst. It seems like his gut is especially sensitive, and when we go out of town and others feed him, his stomach is sometimes off when we get back due to a change in timing or quantity. Our local vet agreed that he wasn’t himself and she was concerned about his fast breathing – we opted to skip x-rays and instead started him on a week of metacam, stasis and antibiotic meds and he seemed to recover just fine.
But this week he’s scaring us again and we’re out of ideas. He’s been hiding from us, stretching out, not eating much, not interested in cranberries. The weirdest behavior is that he runs into his cage, and flops down on the plate of food we leave for them (instead of … eating it, or even flopping down on something that’s not hard and uncomfortable). Another symptom we noticed was that his breathing has been at times fast and shallow, and at other times, has felt wheezy on the way out (a bit like a poorly maintained gas lawn mower engine: ahhhhhh-put-put-put).
We took him to Catnip & Carrots in NY today, who specializes in rabbits and they took x-rays and listened to him and while they agreed he’s not feeling great, they didn’t have a diagnosis for us – heart looked normal, lungs looked normal, gut sounded fine, no abcesses – and told us to just continue nursing him with food, metacam and reglan. He seemed decently perky at the vet’s office, but as soon as we got him home, he curled up on his food plate and basically hasn’t moved all evening.
We’re pretty scared that something is seriously wrong, but after seeing the premier rabbit specialists near nyc, are stumped as to what we can do next.
Do these symptoms make sense to anyone else?
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