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A bunny poop thread.

thumps_

Wise Old Thumper
I often say that bunny mummies of stasis prone buns are rabbit poop obsessed. We worry over the number passed per day, shape, size, colour & yes, even consistency.
Although my Thumper had a very rare gut problem – unusual type of TB, the problems we encountered were common to all stasis prone buns. His gut was slow at the best of times (because it became thickened by scar tissue & could not contract properly) so he was even more susceptible to all the other causes of stasis. The worst affected part was his caecum & the 1st part of the colon which controls whether the contents produce waste poops or caecals (special poops) & coordination of the timing. It’s called the fusus coli.
The basic workings are that a valve at the end of the small bowel opens & food passes directly into the 1st. part of the colon(like us) Here the food is churned so that the tiny particles which are full of nutrients are shoved into pouches called haustrae at the side of the colon leaving the indigestible fibre in the centre. The fibre moves onwards, water is extracted, & the round poops appear at the end.
Now for the clever bit. With valve at the small bowel now closed the fusus coli changes the type of contractions in the 1st. part of the colon. The haustrae squeeze out their contents & the colon NOW propels it backwards into the caecum.
The caecum is huge in rabbits. Here carefully balanced microorganisms break down the nutrients. Some are absorbed directly through the caecal wall. About twice a day, well after passing waste poops, the caecum empties into the colon in squirts. The colon now propels these contents to the rear end forming tiny grape like packages covered with protective mucus, variously called caecotrophs / caecals / or special poohs. The mixture of released nutrients & dead microorganisms is highly nutritious.
We shouldn’t see these caecals. All we see is bunny apparently washing his private parts, but his head coming up munching, with a certain contented expression. Interestingly although they make chewing movements for up to a minute they don’t actually chew the caecals. When pm’s are done, the caecals are always found intact in the rabbit’s stomach.
Typical posture of a bunny eating a ceacal.
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To poops. These are nice normal poops of a hay eating rabbit.
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These are “reasonably” normal poops of a rabbit eating wild forage only.
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Fur balls, also called Trichobezoa. These shouldn’t cause a problem unless the gut has already slowed down, or in unusually long furred rabbits eg angoras. Always remember that the bun with the problem may have got it from grooming his partner!
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You can see the pointed tags of fur sticking out, the general excess of fur on the outside, & how they can join together into a string of poops commonly called a poop necklace, or rosary bead poops. They’ll usually be larger than this. Thumper had gut slow down about every 3 days & his food intake dropped off hence the small poops.
Here is another selection of fur balls of different shapes & sizes.
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Normal caecals can be brown or black.
www.google.co.uk/imgres?num=10&hl=e...w=157&start=0&ndsp=15&ved=1t:429,r:2,s:0,i:79
Eating caecals is partly a reflex action but if they don’t smell right, bunny won’t eat them. Something as minor as changing food type, or meds can cause them to do this for a few days. It’s also a hall mark that the balance of microorganisms in the gut is wrong – dysbiosis, which can be of all grades from non detectable to us, to right stinkers you know have happened when you open the door, to severe runny unformed caecals which present an emergency particularly to young buns.
Unformed caecals. Caecals which are runny like this are very worrying even in an adult bun. Many folk think their bun has got diarrhoea, but when they look further the waste poops are normal. If there are no normal waste poops, & it’s all like this, bunny is very seriously ill indeed.
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A large soft mass of caecal material, is usually caused by feeding bunny too much rich food –pellets & veg. A hay only diet for a few weeks then gradual reintroduction of other foods usually does the trick. In Thumper’s case his caecum had stopped filling & completely collapsed. We assume there was a bit of a stump at the base where this eye watering mess was stored! (Immediately above the penny.) To the right of the mass are some fairly normal looking waste poops. The one broken in half shows good fibre separation – all dry fibre inside. To the right of the penny is a long waste poop of 3 rammed into1. Either there’s been a temporary lack of muscular co ordination or a block I never found.
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Mixed caecal & wastes. This is always abnormal. Obviously the timing mechanism in the fusus coli is kaput.
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2 Thumper specials.
Thumper would stop eating for about 18 hours. (In most rabbits this needs emergency attention much earlier) His waste poops would be tiny & black. Eventually he’d pass a mixed caecal + waste, & immediately start eating again with larger poops. By this time there were considerable problems throughout the colon & all his waste poops were misshapen. This is fairly typical of a megacolon bunny but unlike a megacolon bunny Thumper never passed any mucus.
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Finally, he showed me that blackthorn leaves helped his gut a lot. At this time he was taking double the recommended dose of domperidone, in desperation I gave him the leaves in medicine form. Everything “speeded up too much”, with “guinea pig poops” & with very poor fibre separation.
DSCF4959.jpg

Please may I emphasise that the occasional odd poop is fine. Thumper’s poops were always abnormal. I had to use photos of Benjie’s poops to find normal ones. He lived to be 6 years 4 months, & helped both humans & rabbits remarkably. Perhaps myself most of all. RIP my little darling.
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It amazes me that Thumps could have been so ill! The second picture of him in your signature he is so toned and glossy looking he looks so well!
Thank you for the post, I feel I am becoming poop obsessed! 'Sheep poo should look like rabbits poo but darker. If the goat poo is stuck together they need worming, the cattle have had too much lush grass (eeeeewwwwwww!) and need a bit of poor grazing for a few days.....'
There isn't much that can sneak by health wise without some sign or another in the poop!
 
It amazes me that Thumps could have been so ill! The second picture of him in your signature he is so toned and glossy looking he looks so well!
Thank you for the post, I feel I am becoming poop obsessed! 'Sheep poo should look like rabbits poo but darker. If the goat poo is stuck together they need worming, the cattle have had too much lush grass (eeeeewwwwwww!) and need a bit of poor grazing for a few days.....'
There isn't much that can sneak by health wise without some sign or another in the poop!

That's what free feeding a totally foraged diet can do for a bun. Sowthistles got him through the 10 months when his caecum didn't fill. I even used my scant knowledge of medieval history about which weeds peasants were driven to eat during crop failure & times of starvation. Then the blackthorn leaves became effective, & his caecum started to fill again. He looked like that the day his was pts. There just wasn't enough of the wild food he needed as winter approached & his gut couldn't manage it dried. We tried to wean him onto it for 6 weeks - just got stasis every time.

Yep & sheep get mucky bum on spring grass every year :lol:

ETA As for abnormal human poop. Why we describe as like what goes in the top end beats me - eg rice water stools etc. etc.:shock:
 
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A very informative post.

I often find Grim's mixed poos and cecals. :? I worry about how messed up he is inside because most of the time he looks great.
 
Regardless of how healthy a poop is, its always handy to be able to know about UNHEALTHY poops....

Sticky this me thinks.xx
 
Regardless of how healthy a poop is, its always handy to be able to know about UNHEALTHY poops....

Sticky this me thinks.xx

I completely agree and it was already put in both the Health and Diet stickies this morning for future reference. :thumb: :D

Thanks thumps, I found it very informative too :wave: but forgot to post to say so earlier. :oops:
 
fantastic information thumps!! im totally poop obsessed. Leah has become a fully foraging diet now as her poops now are sooo much better due to it and the plant herb threads have been invaluable. totally agree this should be a sticky thread and went to check on both the health and diet and digestion categories, but it wasnt there. :(
 
totally agree this should be a sticky thread and went to check on both the health and diet and digestion categories, but it wasnt there. :(

There are so many useful threads that we don't have room to sticky them all individually. At the top of each of those sections, though, you'll find a sticky called "Old Useful Topics"; the link to this thread has been put in there. :D:D
 
fantastic information thumps!! im totally poop obsessed. Leah has become a fully foraging diet now as her poops now are sooo much better due to it and the plant herb threads have been invaluable. totally agree this should be a sticky thread and went to check on both the health and diet and digestion categories, but it wasnt there. :(

Thank you for such a lovely compliment. I'm delighted that Leah has benefitted from a foraged diet. You know all of this it has been group effort, & sheer joy to me to learn from others as well as to contribute. I'm always amused that I was mainly taught by rabbits.:lol:

I'm also very aware that the summer before I joined RU rabbit after rabbit died from stasis & Jack's - Jane made incredible advances in the field of treating stasis.

By then Thumper was too ill to tolerate a modern diet, & in desperation I went back to old fashioned ways of feeding, gradually discovering that others did this too, but kept quiet about it. Other schoolchildren & I had been competant foragers by the age of 7, so it was a matter of "surely if well supported by a group of us, others can be safe too". We were all convinced from doing it for a few years that our stasis prone rabbits had been helped a lot. I suspected that it would help all rabbits too.

The next step was to try to at least reduce the frequency of stasis.
The big worry was helping others to be safe, & involving the many people who live in cities.
I always hope that people will also enjoy it & perhaps escape from the artificial concrete jungle most of us live in, to enjoy & learn more about the ever diminishing real world, I love so much.

This last thread is really about whether by looking at the poops we can realise that bunny's tummy isn't working properly & at least sometimes be able to do something about it before disaster strikes. It was triggered by being referred to as the "bunny poop expert" on RU.:lol: I certainly don't feel an expert but decided that time was overdue to share what I'd gleaned. :lol: You can ALL be bunny poop experts now!:lol:
 
This thread has come at a perfect time for me with my Bluebell haveing reoccurent statis. I am reducing pellets and foraging every few days for her to give her a mainly foraged/hay diet with a very small amount of veggies/pellets. This will really help when checking her poops. Thankyou.
 
Thankyou for the insight and photographic explanation, very informative. Will take my little one to the vets as she's had a messy bum - and normal poops - for a while. :thumb:

Took a while to find this thread....
 
My gorgeous lance passed away a month ago from what I suspect was bloat / stasis. He was a stasis prone bunny also. So just to simplify this , lance would have left around a lot of big oval shaped poops - just like the one above the penny pic. So what does this mean if he produced more of these than normal poops ?? He had been xrayed the day before he passed away and no blockage were shown.
 
My gorgeous lance passed away a month ago from what I suspect was bloat / stasis. He was a stasis prone bunny also. So just to simplify this , lance would have left around a lot of big oval shaped poops - just like the one above the penny pic. So what does this mean if he produced more of these than normal poops ?? He had been xrayed the day before he passed away and no blockage were shown.

I'm so sorry that Lance passed away. In Thumper's case, the big eye watering oval poops happened when we knew that his caecum had collapsed & wasn't filling (ultrasound). It was a firm mass of "undigested" caecal material" from the stump of a caecum with no fibre in it.
Bunnies shouldn't produce this at all.
Thumper was only given 2 months to live with a non filling caecum.
No medicines got his caecum working again, he survived the summer on wild plants. It was a total surprise to me that when the blackthorn leaves were ready, his caecum started to fill again within a month. Very little is known about blackthorn leaves but wild bunnies eat every fallen one they can get their teeth on!

It sounds to me as if Lance might have had some very serious caecal issues. Neither did Thumper have blocks. He had frightening gut slow down, sometimes going18 hours without poohing until the abnormal pooh came out. The runny abnormal caecals which came afterwards were very smelly indeed.

Throughout his life we thought that the nerve supply to the caecum & gut was being severely damaged. There is also a type of megacolon which mainly affects the caecum. There are other illnesses which affect the caecum too.
It was a shock to find he was the 1st. rabbit to have this particular type of TB & in fact scar tissue was preventing the gut from contracting.
The specific diagnosis apart from which part of the gut isn't contracting didn't matter - the management was the same.
I happened to be more than fortunate to live near the countryside & some allotments & could get him the plants he needed. I was delighted that the things he ate helped rabbits with other stasis issues.
There's a thread about that too.
http://forums.rabbitrehome.org.uk/s...ried-given-your-stasis-prone-buns-tree-leaves My wonderful vet at the time was so impressed by How Thumper chose the plants which helped him she started to give them to hospitalised stasis buns - Marie Kubiak contributes her experience on the thread too.
I empathise so much with you in nursing a bunny with stasis, it can feel like a nightmare. I'm so sorry for your loss.
 
What an informative thread. I have learned so much about rabbit poo in the space of a few minutes - thank you :thumb:
 
Thanks for all the good info. I had a stasis prone bun, now at the bridge, but had her nearly 10 yrs with frequent late night trips to emergency vets :( it does make you obsessive over poops & you can see straight away when something is wrong.

My jazz isn't eating tonight & not many poops so vets tomorrow I think :( :( tummy rubs produced some poops do everything is crossed
 
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