Jack's-Jane
Wise Old Thumper
Just read this on a Vet Website
Over the past few years rabbits have quickly increased in importance as pets in the UK, currently being the third most commonly kept pet in this country.
General knowledge about rabbit medicine and surgery is therefore developing quickly, but there are still some basic areas that remain poorly studied and understood. Pain recognition and relief is one of them.
Pain is defined by the Committee on Taxonomy for the International Association for the Study of Pain as:
"An unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage."
In view of the difficulties in pain recognition, an anthropomorphic view is often applied to rabbit analgesia, where analgesia is provided to an animal undergoing any procedure or pathology that would be expected to cause pain/distress in a human.
In a survey published in 1999 by Lascelles et al on the use of analgesics by British small animal veterinarians, some worrying results came to light. While analgesics were administered by 71% of surgeons to dogs and by 56% to cats undergoing laparotomy, only 22% would give small mammals peri-operative analgesia . Two factors were thought to be responsible for this:
Veterinarians and veterinary nurses were not familiar enough with species of small mammals and could not recognize signs of pain in them.
Dose regimes for analgesic drugs on small mammals and their possible side effects were not known.
To date no controlled study has been carried out to design a pain scoring system in rabbits in a clinical environment.
In the wild rabbits are a "prey species". They cannot afford to show any signs of pain or distress, as this would only alert potential predators in search of an "easy catch". Therefore, a sick rabbit, or a rabbit in pain, will try to hide, staying still. Pet rabbits have retained this instinct. Unfortunately, humans are a potential predator for rabbits, and they tend to display this "displacement behavior" in front of us.
How much do you think things are improving with regards to Vets recognising and treating pain in Rabbits ?
Over the past few years rabbits have quickly increased in importance as pets in the UK, currently being the third most commonly kept pet in this country.
General knowledge about rabbit medicine and surgery is therefore developing quickly, but there are still some basic areas that remain poorly studied and understood. Pain recognition and relief is one of them.
Pain is defined by the Committee on Taxonomy for the International Association for the Study of Pain as:
"An unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage."
In view of the difficulties in pain recognition, an anthropomorphic view is often applied to rabbit analgesia, where analgesia is provided to an animal undergoing any procedure or pathology that would be expected to cause pain/distress in a human.
In a survey published in 1999 by Lascelles et al on the use of analgesics by British small animal veterinarians, some worrying results came to light. While analgesics were administered by 71% of surgeons to dogs and by 56% to cats undergoing laparotomy, only 22% would give small mammals peri-operative analgesia . Two factors were thought to be responsible for this:
Veterinarians and veterinary nurses were not familiar enough with species of small mammals and could not recognize signs of pain in them.
Dose regimes for analgesic drugs on small mammals and their possible side effects were not known.
To date no controlled study has been carried out to design a pain scoring system in rabbits in a clinical environment.
In the wild rabbits are a "prey species". They cannot afford to show any signs of pain or distress, as this would only alert potential predators in search of an "easy catch". Therefore, a sick rabbit, or a rabbit in pain, will try to hide, staying still. Pet rabbits have retained this instinct. Unfortunately, humans are a potential predator for rabbits, and they tend to display this "displacement behavior" in front of us.
How much do you think things are improving with regards to Vets recognising and treating pain in Rabbits ?