Treating Rabbit Snuffles Without a Vet

Let me begin by saying I am not suggesting that you skip the vet if you like to do the vet thing. The issue here is that vets tend to cost more than new rabbits, so our family policy is that we don’t do vets. We don’t even do vets for our goats. If your animal is worth a lot to you — if it is your prize breeding doe, or an award-winning show rabbit — you probably should go to a vet.

So here is the deal.

Daughter Q.’s rabbit, Moonlight, is very naughty. Her temperament is terrible. She bites. Even my husband is afraid to feed her because you never know when she is going to get you. Her parents were meat rabbits, and my guess is that she didn’t have much handling in her infancy. She was young when we got her, but I’ve lately learned that how a baby animal is handled {or not handled} even the first month or so can make a world of difference in their receptivity to humans later on.

Moonlight is currently for sale, by the way.

So, long story short, we decided we were in the market for a new rabbit. Q-Age-Six ended up receiving a rabbit from another 4-H member who had shown him at the Fair and decided subsequently that she was done with raising rabbits.

Being trained to be shown means that he is the sweetest, best tempered rabbit we’ve met yet.

She named him Loppy. {He’s a mini-lop.}

The previous owner mentioned that he had picked up “something” at the Fair — he’d gotten a “cold,” she said — and he’d done a round of antibiotics from the vet.

I didn’t know this until Daughter Q. came to me with concern about Loppy having a runny nose and making a funny noise when he tried to breath. It was then that I remembered that at 4-H they tell us to always quarantine new animals for a while before allowing the animals to mix, but of course that was too late. I’d had their cages side by side for a few days at that point.

A-Age-Eight’s rabbit, Thumper, had already been exposed, and within 24 hours she came to me worried about her rabbit.

So we don’t do vets, but my girls are seriously attached to their rabbits, especially Daughter A., who’s had her rabbit for two years now. After doing a bit of Internet searching and coming to the conclusion that we were probably dealing with something called “snuffles” and that it’s very dangerous and highly contagious, well…you can imagine where my Mommy Brain went. I was horrified to think of the possibility two little girls sobbing over the loss of their beloved pets.

So, I did what I usually do when a child is sick, which is to say that I did research.

I looked up natural remedies, alternative treatments, and so on.

In the end, the treatment of rabbits sounded remarkably similar to the treatment of humans, truth be told. The most important thing I learned is that snuffles is a bacterial infection.

So, I went through my medicine cupboard to see what I could think of. What could I use that I already had on hand? I decided to pack a double punch.

 

Punch One:

I always have Citricidal GSE on hand. It was hard to decide on a dose because I couldn’t find any instance of anyone trying it. I knew that, as a concentrate, it is very powerful, a little goes a long ways (GSE is a very powerful anti-bacterial agent), and the taste is very bitter.

The rabbits were given two drops in their water bottles. Honestly, I was more fearful they would reject the water from bitterness than that the dose was too high.

 

Punch Two:

Another thing I keep on hand is a cheap bottle of echinacea and goldenseal tablets from Trader Joe’s. It seems very similar to the image above, only those are capsules which makes them even easier to deal with. (Capsules are what I’m buying when I run out.) The tablets I used did have preservatives in them, but it is a tiny amount, and mostly they are just blended up herbs. The rabbits liked them, but weren’t able to consume them whole, so we cut them into tiny pieces with a knife, and they licked them up like candy. This is why I want to use capsules next time! No cutting; just empty it into the food bowl.

They received one tablet per day. Again, I decided on only one out of caution, not because I have any knowledge of a good dose for a rabbit.

Medicine is mostly art in my house. Some of you probably cringe at that, but there you have it: I am a mad scientist and the folks around me are my guinea pigs.

Ahem.

Anyhow, I am pleased to report that not only are the rabbits not dead, but they are doing quite well. Thumper is entirely better, though we’re still doing GSE in the water for a few more days. Loppy’s runny nose is gone, but he still seems to be dragging a little, so we’re treating him with both for a couple more days, and then we’ll continue the GSE a bit beyond that. In the meantime, we are making sure he’s eating lots of fresh food, especially lots of fresh parsley, which is the ideal herb for rabbits in my mostly uneducated opinion.

It is sort of like how barley is the perfect grain for goats, but I digress.

I was going to title this post “HOW TO Treat Rabbit Snuffles Without a Vet” but that’d be a misnomer. This is a way that worked for me, but probably not the ideal way to go about it. For example: you could start by actually knowing what you are doing, and that would be something for sure.

But it did work, and so I thought I’d share it with you, in case you are having a snuffles emergency at your house, too.

 

And here is another option:

Since I first wrote this post, there are some new products on the market. I haven’t used them because we’ve never had another problem with snuffles (I’m saying this over three years later, by the way). But, in case you want to try something different, here is what I’m talking about:

This remedy contains other herbs (not mentioned in my approach) that have wonderful anti-bacterial properties — balsam, camphor, and rosemary, to name a few. I’ve heard good things about it, but like I said before, I haven’t tried it.

Also, this is not to be missed for recovery:

The ingredients in this supplement are fantastic for the normal life of a rabbit, but become even more important for a rabbit that is recovering from an illness.