My Husbandry Moment: Treating Rabbit Patient With Fungal Infections

Even with my busy everyday life, I never forget my responsibilities, and part of it is the rabbits that I have. Failure for others, fail and not minding their rabbits for their busy day-to-day life; some friends of mine decide to dispose of all the rabbits, while others sadly turn bad. Lacking attention and care lead to a problem for your animals. A common problem in rabbits is fungal infections and diseases. I have a patient rabbit that I had been eying for weeks before I made the decision that I must cure it quickly.

At the moment and in the coming days, I am fine busy, but writing a blog telling my life story into words hunts me. At least update my life, my hobby, and my rabbits. January 2022, when I started my simple rabbitry, I started only three specimens, two female and one male. Now that I am a year-old keeper, I have seen a lot: observation and personal experience.

I only feed them twice a day now that I have limited time to visit them during weekdays. Once at 7 AM, before I go out home, I make sure to change the water and give them enough feed to eat at least noon and another 7 PM or 8 PM. They are nocturnal animals, so feeding them at that time is OK, as they are expected to be more awake at night, eating and playing around their cage. I liked that my body clock at mentioned hours showed a response. One time I went home at night and was drunk and felt something weird before going to bed. Something bothered me; until I realized my mistake, I had yet to feed the rabbits. Sinking, my head immediately returns and gives them food and water.

I have new kits or baby rabbits born last November last year. The second week, I noticed something upon checking. Fungal infection, just a tiny white-colored build-up of skin fungus: I refrain from touching or even making contact with those baby rabbits; if I had to check, I made sure to sanitize my hand with ethyl alcohol. These are also the thing I am not tired of mentioning to others, especially those people who also want to have rabbits as their pets, a fungal infection could be transmitted through human and animal hand contact. So really advise looking closely at the animals when you are having free interaction with your Childs.

I waited for another two weeks before I decided to cure it. One thing is that the sucking age of rabbits is a sensitive era; a mother rabbit might reject the baby when she smells something weird in the baby. Fungicide is known to have an awful smell, so I am careful as I also understand the behaviour practice of the rabbits.

As I waited for the right day old to administer a drug, it got worse, and infection led to some obvious visible problems, so I quarantined the rabbit to avoid further spread to another young rabbit. Fungicide is painful, as its chemical compound acts immediately to kill the fungal manifestation. That's one of the considerations of age and the size of the rabbit before giving them such potent drugs. Could they withstand the chemicals it contains, or could they result in a more dangerous result? Also, I am gaining more knowledge and information about small ruminants, which I will use in my dissertation.

As it's not that severe, I gave the rabbit patient a small drop of Fungicide (fluid base) and an immediate response to what I expected. The patient shows irritation and discomfort. As much as possible, I don't want to treat my rabbits with pills or tablet drugs; whatever the age was, the remedy is much better. The stomach and responsiveness to potent drugs resulted in mortality from my observation and experience.

Regarding fungal infection, it's not only the external part of the rabbits affected. Some fungi also attack inside. Some obvious signs and symptoms were changes in their behavior and sneezing continuously. For my rabbit's patient in showing that kind of symptom, I gave them water treated with Dextrose powder (Animal base) for a week or two until it was just gone, helping them fight the fungal or bacterial infections near their nasal.

After three days of giving Fungicide to the infected rabbit, it's now cured.

Note that treating animals with fungal infections, you must be careful in the skin contacts as it could be transmitted to your body, well, there is always science in farming, and that's the exciting part as far as I see.

My life is busy at the moment and in the following days to come, but I will stay up within my responsibilities as I know the result of negligence will happen in the end. I choose to have animals, so they are my responsibility, don't get pets or livestock if you are not emotionally or free because they suffer as much as we don't see. Thanks for reading