Aw Poop—why does it look like he smushed it into the carpet

[Liung]

Woke up today to this:


Lahi almost always leaves a scattering if poops in this part of the floor. Sometimes even a small pile. It’s fine, he’s 13, he’s allowed to poop outside the litter box, and it helps me keep an eye on his health, to be able to see his poops separately from Delilah. Recently I noticed his poops were getting extremely tiny, which given his tooth problems I thought was a pretty reasonable indicator he’s not been eating enough hay. He’s been having a lot of chewing difficulties lately. So I started giving him some hay cubes with his bowl of food, and that seemed to help a lot. His poops were getting back up to a reasonable size!

And now this.



My first thought was OH NO DIARRHEA?! But it doesn’t look liquid enough for that. It honestly looks like he had soft poops and then systematically ground them into the rug????

I can’t even imagine what would cause this. He got a few bites of Delilah’s lower calorie pellets last night but that’s literally the only thing unusual that has happened for him. And they’re just slight variants on the same brand so I certainly wouldn’t think it could cause that much of a stomach upset.


I needed to bring him to the vet anyway for a checkup on his teeth, but maybe I should be speeding that up?? I don’t think he’s in significant distress. He’s got some food left in his bowl but he took a pellet I handed him without hesitation.

 

[Liung]

Much to his displeasure I picked him up to examine him. His butt isn’t poopy in the slightest!!



With a little prodding I did find two poops stuck in his fur behind his thighs but they’re fully formed, definitely not cecotrophs. Which is so confusing! Smeared poop like that I would expect to have been cecotrophs, but how would they be smeared on the ground and not his butt?? And for normal poops to be stuck in his fur but no cecotrophs??? What is going on?????



In good news though his sore hocks look the best they’ve been in well over five years. At their worst they were red and inflamed and crusty with ulceration, like they would break open and bleed at any moment. Today they were almost entirely free of ulceration and were a light pink with a bit of darker pink toward the centre. The amount of effort I had to put into overhauling environmental conditions to make that happen!!

In the meantime, to his further displeasure, I got a couple spoonfuls of Critical Care into him. I tried to pacify him with some dehydrated fruit but while he took half the strawberry cube he turned his nose up at the banana slice. Poor bud-bud. Indignities upon his person.

 

[JBun]

My rabbits will on occasion, produce some odd poop. As long as it doesn't continue to occur I just presume there was something in their food that caused a minor upset.

Just curious what changes you made to help with the sore hocks?

He seems to be doing pretty well for an old guy

 

[Liung]

So everyone knows that the most common causes of sore hocks are obesity, wire flooring, and dirty/urine-soaked bedding, with a side dish of short fur as a risk factor. Considering Lahi had none of these, I was really confused as to why he suddenly had sore hocks! Turns out, flat, hard flooring is another cause. The way my vet explained it was that rabbit feet are meant to dig into soft earth, and when they stand on hard flooring, their toes don’t have anything to sink into, and tilt their whole foot back to put unnecessary pressure on their hocks.

Despite having access to a cage full of shavings, a carrier full of towels, and various other flooring option, Lahi’s enclosure was in the basement, on bare concrete. After 7 years it had a bit of a cumulative effect.


Basically, Lahi hasn’t been allowed to walk on hard flooring since. I completely overhauled the enclosure to be fully carpeted after testing them with some polar fleece taped down to see if they’d try to chew it. Thankfully they are not inclined toward eating carpet. That halted the progression of the sore hocks, and I kept an eye on them but they never got worse than crusty and angry.



However I attended a talk by a vet from Campus Animal Estates, who said that carpet is not a good solution for rabbits with sore hocks if they are made of artificial fibres. She said “if you wouldn’t want to slide across it on your knees, it’s abrasive to sore hocks!”

Well that sort of rules out... everything??? But it got me thinking about not just covering all hard floors, but what I cover them with. When we moved to Guelph and I decided to build them an entire room from scratch, none of what I chose was that polyester/acrylic pile carpet I’d used before. Part of that was coincidental—I consciously chose to put a jute rug and a cotton throw rug over the foam mats on the floor, so I wouldn’t ever have to worry if they ate a bit, but the only reason I didn’t go for carpet again on the condo shelves was because I decided to use polar fleece to make pillowcase style covers that I would easily be able to remove and throw in the washing machine. Moving in with my hubby who is quite allergic to rabbits, I designed everything to be easily cleaned, and in fact those poop spots are not coming out with vinegar, so I’m going to dump the entire rug in the washing machine.



Getting him off hard flooring managed the sore hocks, but now they look so mild! And I think the reason that they’re finally improving is that all his flooring is nonabrasive and also that he’s got a variety of flooring. He’s got polar fleece, cotton rugs, the jute carpet, and then of course the litter boxes. And a really big Costco dog bed for if he really wants something cushiony. There are wooden platforms next to the litter boxes that are hard, but he never spends any time on them.

And that’s the other thing I’ve heard, that it’s more than soft flooring it’s the variety of flooring that’s important.

 

[Dominus]

My guess is, is he's going for the cecals, determining them too soft to eat and dropping them. Then just his normal movements make him step on it and grind it in the floor. Glad to hear his hocks are okay.

 

[Liung]

My biggest confusion is how on earth he managed to do this without getting any poop on himself. My experience with uneaten cecotrophs is that they’re horribly sticky and will easily get stuck on anything. But there’s no poop anywhere on his fur!

And further my experience with them is they end up in a big lump on the floor, even if they do get flattened. Because they’re like a bunch of tiny grapes, right? But for the most part what was on my carpet doesn’t look anything like I’ve seen before. Not in colour, not in shape, not in thickness, and certainly not in how they’ve been smeared!!

I’ll say, getting it out of the carpet is damnably hard. Vinegar did basically nothing. Sitting there breaking pieces off with my fingers did the most. Giving it a scrub with some Ivory dish soap helped get the staining out, but it’s definitely still there.

I haven’t shoved it in the washer yet because we’re in an apartment with coin laundry and washer and dryer is like $5. But they’re excellent washers that have consistently removed all the fur and pee stains from the shelf covers, so I’m sure they’ll handle this fine.

 

[Dominus]

Soft cecals don't look like grapes. If they're soft enough they can look like giant teardrops of sticky nastiness, because they weren't... 'baked' enough in the cecum and came out early.