Wild Baby Cottontail

[jaden420]

In our backyard there's a family of about ten cottontails. We usually have our pet rabbit out in a pen in the backyard and we've noticed that there's a baby rabbit that just stands in the same spot about one metre away from her pen for hours at a time. We tried getting close to it to see what was wrong with it and we saw that one of its eyes is injured and closed shut and it was slower than other rabbits (it would let us get right up to it and only run away if we made too much noise or touched it, but it would just run a couple inches away and go back to sitting down and occasionally eating grass.) Today, it went into our rabbit's pen and started trying to breastfeed off of her, but it would also let us touch it and pet it without running away, it just keeps eating grass in the same spot, so we think that the baby thinks our rabbit is its mother and the original mother abandoned it because it's different from the others. There's constantly flies landing on it and crawling all around the scratched eye. My mom thinks that we should just let its eye heal and my sister thinks we should take it and keep it as a pet (we're not going to) and I don't know what to do about it and I'm worried because I don't think it's going to survive on its own.

 

[JBun]

If you can find a wildlife rehabber for your area, I would suggest contacting them. If the baby doesn't get what is a likely eye infection treated, in the very least it's likely to lose the eye, worst case is the infection could spread and kill it, or with the flies it could get flystrike from maggots which can prove deadly within a day if that happens. So getting it the appropriate help right away could save it's life.
MediRabbit (flystrike, warning contains graphic medical related photos )
http://wildlife.rescueshelter.com/ca
Also be aware of the possibility that wild rabbits can carry diseases that could be passed to your rabbit. So you may want to prevent any possible contact your rabbit could have with them.