Rabbit 1. We have a mom of some babies, babies born 48 hours ago. Somehow before birth she ended up with a big whole in her lip. Like I mean from the nose to the gum and skin. It’s very strange. Looks like maybe a bite? Can get photo if needed. Rescued lionhead mix.
Rabbit 2. Ever since we’ve had her, she’s had this strange head tilt. Just when you pick her up. No ear infection. we think she may be a florida white (REW) is this a neurological issue? Or is this EC? Something else? It has not spread. She is pretty young.
any advice/ comments welcome. I can get photos if needed.
Wry neck can come from neurological damage, physical damage, or
E.cuniculi. Once the rabbit has recovered from the injury or infection, they seem to be able to live happily afterward, albeit with a tilted head.
E. cuniculi:
We've found that rabbits with
E.c. do not survive without focused treatment, but when they do survive the infection, sometimes the head tilt goes away and other times it remains. Once the infection takes hold, the head tilt worsens quickly or very quickly and is often accompanied by rolling as the rabbit tries to maintain its balance. We've never had a buck survive it, and the onset was much more abrupt in bucks. We have had a couple of does come through it and live long, healthy productive lives. Here's my daughter's Mini Rex, Moonlight, with one of her litters more than a year after her bout with
E.c. which had apparently lodged in both her brain and her eyes. None of her offspring ever had any problems with
E.c. or wry neck.
It might be hard to recognize immediately in the following photo, but her head was always held at that angle, and her left eye was always a little protruding and staring like that (she reminded us of Marty Feldman
).
Physical and/or neurological damage:
We had a Polish doe that seemed to have acquired her head tilt after being dropped at a show. She was disqualified for wry neck on the second judging table, after the dropping incident. Her owner, unbeknownst to us, was having mini strokes, and after she passed away the next week, we took in Kao (renamed Dizzy). We believe it was neurological damage because she was also completely blind. She never rolled like rabbits with
E.c. tend to, but she had a tendency to spin in ever-widening concentric circles as she tried to figure out where she was; once she had touched several familiar objects and knew where she was in the living room, she'd stop spinning.
The head tilt came and went; it mostly became apparent when she was stressed. At other times she looked nearly normal. I don't have many photos of her head tilt (we tried very hard not to stress her). She loved being held, I suppose because she felt secure that way. Although she was a stunning little BEW, we never tried to breed her because we didn't want to subject her to that physical stress.
Here her head tilt is visible the day after she arrived at our house (she's not really all curled up in the arms, her head is actually angled toward the left):
Here she is later, comfortable in her cage:
