Second doe to get paralyzed.

On June 6th one of best does got paralyzed, I think it was because my younger brother pulled her out of the nesting box when he thought she was eating the babies and not feeding them. We put her down a couple days later because she was in a lot of pain and couldn't clean herself. It was so hard for me to do that she is only 2 or 3 years old, and my best doe. Yesterday night when my younger brother did chores he noticed that our other doe was dragging her hind legs. I have had her and her babies out in the grazing ark for 3 days now. I put her in her cage, she doesn't seem like she is in pain, at least not like my other doe did. There is a possibility that she jumped weird and paralyzed herself but I can't see that happening. Is there such a thing as a disease or something? I am guessing I'm going to have to put her down as well but I really want to know what happened and why. Any ideas on why this is happening will be greatly appreciated!

E.cuniculi can cause hindquarter paralysis, but from my reading, that symptom of E.cuniculi usually occurs in elderly bunnies. Certainly something to look into, though.

Rabbits can bruise or break their backs very easily.

If you put her down, you can probably get your answer if you have the fortitude to open her up and inspect the spine area. If you find bruising, then injury is probably your answer. If there's no bruising or injury you can find, E.cuniculi is probably the next highest possibility.

E. cuniculi is a really common - here it says as many as 40-80% of rabbits test positive but may just carry with no symptoms. http://www.medirabbit.com/EN/Neurology/ ... hamine.htm

Its a protozoal parasite and can travel and go to the spine and cause hind leg paralysis or to the brain and cause head tilt and wondering eyes, or cataracts....
Your does may have been carrying it with no symptoms but after the stress of having kits it was able to compromise the immune system and strike.
Paralysis occurs in part because of inflammation and often after an anti-inflamatory is given rabbits see a lot of improvement.

If you are not going to the vet it might be interesting to see if giving the rabbit low dose of aspirin alleviates symptons (if you do this look the dosage up online) but it would be better to go to the vets and get the safer-for-rabbits anti-inflamatory metacam. But that wouldn't cure her it might just alleviate the symptoms.

If you want to treat the protozoal infection use a treatment like Panacur or Safeguard, which has the active ingedient fenbendazole. Because its a common infection some rabbit breeders just treat all their rabbits with fenbendazole once or twice a year as a preventitive.

I actually had a rabbit that had symptoms of paralysis so I just assumed all my rabbits are carrying and and treated all with fenbendazole. I used the Safeguard for goats because its less expensive.

Sorry to hear that you have yet another paralyzed bunny!

I had a couple of cases of paralysis last year, and found the cysts of rabbit tapeworm (Taenia Pisiformis) in one of the bunnies when I necropsied it. I suspect that it may be possible that if they encyst themselves in or near the spine or brain paralysis may result. I was feeding gathered weeds to the rabbits and they must have ingested the eggs from those.



Here is a picture of the cysts I found:



http://www.medirabbit.com/EN/GI_disease ... peworm.htm

If you do end up having to put her down, I would encourage you to do a necropsy. If she broke her back you will see bruising of the muscle tissue around the break.