Poopy Butt, Excess Ceotropes, and Barely Eating

[CrazyChickenGirl]

Yesterday I noticed Dune wasn’t as energetic as usual and he had some uneaten ceotropes. I brushed it off as it just being because he was hot (I mist their ears, they have tile, and they have frozen water bottles, but we don’t have an air conditioner to put in the room that the rabbits are in). Today, he’s worse, he still hasn’t eaten his pellets from last night (he gets 1/8 a cup for breakfast and 1/8 a cup for dinner), he has large uneaten ceotropes all over his pen, and his butt is DISGUSTING (it also smells HORRIBLE).
There has been NOTHING outside of his usual routine/diet lately, and I can’t think of anything that would cause this.
I know this obviously warrants an emergency vet visit, but the only rabbit savvy vet in our area (and that I actually trust) is booked for a couple weeks and doesn’t have emergency care. I’ve tried multiple other vets that said they were “good with rabbits” and they each failed miserably. I got recommended to a vet that’s an hour away and I have no idea how they actually are with rabbits. I’m open to any suggestions right now. What on Earth could be the matter? Is it bad enough to warrant the risk of taking him to a vet with a 50/50 chance of being good with rabbits? Thanks in advance for your help.

 

[JBun]

Are you certain it's mushy cecotropes and not diarrhea? True diarrhea would be an emergency. Are you seeing any blood or mucous in the poop? If your house has AC, could you bring him inside for now?

 

[CrazyChickenGirl]

Are you certain it's mushy cecotropes and not diarrhea? True diarrhea would be an emergency. Are you seeing any blood or mucous in the poop? If your house has AC, could you bring him inside for now?

There is no blood or mucus in his poop. I don’t know how to tell the difference between diarrhea and ceotrpes, but it smells and looks like ceotropes. He lives in the house, but the room he’s in doesn’t have air conditioning because the windows are the wrong shape. There are only two rooms in the house that are air conditioned (the rest are the same temperature or hotter than the room he’s in), my parents room and my brother’s room. Both are have allergies and have trouble breathing around too much rabbit hair (Dune is currently molting).
I gave him a butt bath (because his butt was worse than the original picture) and he ate some wet dandelion leaves, in that aspect he’s better. However, butt looks all red and swollen now.
Is this worth risking a not rabbit savvy vet?

 

[CrazyChickenGirl]

There is no blood or mucus in his poop. I don’t know how to tell the difference between diarrhea and ceotrpes, but it smells and looks like ceotropes. He lives in the house, but the room he’s in doesn’t have air conditioning because the windows are the wrong shape. There are only two rooms in the house that are air conditioned (the rest are the same temperature or hotter than the room he’s in), my parents room and my brother’s room. Both are have allergies and have trouble breathing around too much rabbit hair (Dune is currently molting).
I gave him a butt bath (because his butt was worse than the original picture) and he ate some wet dandelion leaves, in that aspect he’s better. However, butt looks all red and swollen now. View attachment 65119
Is this worth risking a not rabbit savvy vet?

His butt isn’t swollen anymore, I don’t know why it WAS.

 

[JBun]

Diarrhea is where little to no normal round fecal balls are being produced. So it would be pudding like diarrhea, maybe with a few irregular fecal balls mixed in. Or it could be profuse water diarrhea with no normal fecal balls. When it's mushy cecotropes, there will be normal fecal balls being produced the rest of the time. True diarrhea is an emergency, mushy cecotropes rarely an emergency and usually diet related.

If you think it's true diarrhea and he's still not back to normal, I would try and get him to a vet that has at least some experience with rabbits. A vet that's not knowledgeable at all, could do more harm than good.

https://bunssb.org/bunnies/guide-bunny-poops
https://wabbitwiki.com/wiki/Rabbit_poop

 

[CrazyChickenGirl]

It looks like cecal dysbiosis. It seems like he’s slowly recovering as well. I started wetting his veggies when he stopped eating his pellets and hay (he would kind of just nibble the veggies and wouldn’t finish them), I’ve been giving him about 1/2 a cup in the morning and 1/2 a cup at night just to keep his gut moving (he hasn’t been finishing them, but he’s been picking through a bit). This morning I noticed he ate all his veggies from last night and he’s been a little more energetic. His current veggies are dandelions, a little celery, and romaine lettuce because I wanted to keep it higher in water and easy to digest when he got sick.