bun recovering from diarrhea

Smudge is recovering from Diarrhea on Tuesday. Now she is managing to keep clean, and her toilets are formed but are wet. We are feeding her mainly hay and just a touch of carrot and pellets (SS), she is also drinking water. It has been suggested pineapple juice but she wont drink it. I am waiting for the results from the vets. How long will she be like this? When should I reintroduce veggies? Is there anything else I can do to make her comfortable, I already clean their toilet tray very regularly.

Thank you for your help. A history of them is below...

hello I have two rescue rabbits, male Binky year and a half, female Smudge 9 months, both mini lops and castrated, house rabbits.

Smudge now has diarrhea we think she may have had a little last week too. Just been to the emergency vet who has given us some water solution and recovery food paste. But Smudge wont eat/drink it. And I dont want to syringe it as it will stress her out more.

She is running around a bit but is also a bit sulky in the corner, she is running differently to normal, kind of kicking out her back legs, but this may be as the vet cleaned her up and all her fur has gone funny with the water.

She is eating hay and drinking water, and we are going back to the vets tomorrow. Do you think I am doing the right thing? any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Also the vet thinks that as only one is ill that it may be something she picked up when she was younger as when she came into rescue she had bad diarrhea

Thank you, I'm very worried.

I would cut out the carrots for a few days & keep the SS to an absolute minimum as the most important thing is to get her eating as much hay as possible. She needs to have lots of fibre and not much sweet stuff as this will help her to rebalance the bacteria in her gut.

Hopefully the vet also gave you a probiotic for the water, keep going with that & if you run out you can get a probiotic from pets at home. Keep her on it for at least a week.

only once her poos are golden, solid and well formed would I start giving her veg & then only give her tiny pieces of one veg and gradually build her up on to her normal veg ration. She is quite a young bun and it is possible that some veg that you gave her has caused the upset as some buns are not tolerent of veg at all.

I wouldn't give her pinapple, this is to help buns break down fur & loosen their stomach mucus which helps to prevent stasis. Again the sugar in the pineapple could actually make her condition worse as the bad bacteria feed off it.

It's very unlikely that something she had in the rescue caused this. Many buns carry bacteria in their stomach or can pick it up for poorly handled veg (which is why it's a good idea to wash any you give them before). Stres or eating too much rich or new food can bring on a bout of runny stools. She is unlikely to have picked up coccidia which causes very serious symptoms in a rescue as both your buns would probably be suffering & TBH she probably would not be with you now as it is a very grave condition indeed. I think the most likely cause is her having a sensitive stomach, coupled with something like a new veg or too much veg/pellets that did not agree with her.

no green, fruit for 7 days. Just 90% hay as they should be eating, and pellet and dry treats.

What cause the diarrhea?

thank you for the advice, she did get given something for her water bottle but she wouldn't drink it, maybe because we were told to add pineapple as well. Recently they have stopped drinking from the water bottle so I put out bowls of water. Not sure what caused the diarrhea but will no more when the results of the samples come back.

a lot of us don't recommend water bottle to begin with, for 2 reasons:

1) they drink more water on bowl
2) water bottle can be defective, we have a thread in the Rabbit chat section just the other day. Some member didn't know the bottle is not working, and the bun has no water to drink

I never use bottle