Bunny care - Rabbit teeth problems
Like 3 Dislike 0 Published on 9 Feb 2016
Malocclusion is a dental disease which is very frequent in bunnies. That means the teeth are out of alignment, thus becoming overgrown (cases of teeth going out of the bunny's mouth or into his/her flash which can cause wounds). Bunnies can be born with it (hereditary) or it can develop because of some trauma (when hit; injury) or the bacterial infection of the tooth roots.
There can be malocclusion of the incisors (front teeth) or the molars (teeth in the back on either side of the mouth, used for grinding the food), or both.
There is a common misconception that malocclusion can be dealt with more hay, wood sticks, toys or something else in order to trim teeth. That is wrong because once the malocclusion has developed, nothing that is used for chewing can help.
So you have to check bunny's teeth regularly.
Some bunnies can show symptoms such as:
less eating, drooling, teeth grinding in pain, lumps in the jaw... Checking incisors is easy, you can do it at home. Molars are tricky and almost impossible to look by yourself, so you have to bring bunny to a rabbit savvy vet, who will do the full examination.
Then, one of the solutions is to regularly trim bunny's incisors. Sometimes trimming is necessary once in 2 months, sometimes even few times a month. If you can't do it by yourself, go to vet. Note that you can't trim molars by yourself, that has to be done by vet.
One of the ways is grinding teeth. Better equipped vets use grinders. The other way is cutting teeth with scissors used for trimming bunny/small cat nails. But sometimes it can be risky because it is easy to fracture a tooth and break it off at the root.
The other solution is the operation - removal of the incisors.
Pigi had the malocclusion since he was 8 months old. From then we were cutting his incisors regularly, once in a month. We did it by ourselves, using nail scissors for cats to cut Pigi’s incisors. I would hold Pigi upright, supporting his butt with one hand and hold his back close to my chest with the other hand, while Pigi’s daddy would cut his incisors.
We did this until the april of 2014, when one of the upper teeth feel out because of the pus. X-rays showed his first abscess at the root of the tooth. He started receiving antibiotics, but abscess kept coming back, second was on his other upper tooth, the third is on the lower teeth. We were fighting with the third one for more than a month but he stopped responding to antibiotics.
So we had decided, after the consultation with the vet and a lot of thinking what is the best for him, that Pigi was going to the removal surgery of the incisors.
His surgery was a success. He started eating and pooping that same day and he could, even, eat his hay. Note that many rabbits need few days to learn to eat hay and other food without their teeth.
When bunnies have malocclusion you have to cut their food in small pieces, so we continued doing that after the removal surgery. The only difference is that we cut the pieces even more now than before, so he wouldn’t choke on bigger pieces. Some rabbits have difficulty in upkeeping the hygiene of their fur/intimate parts because they miss their teeth that help with keeping the hygiene so they require owners’ assistance with that.
But other than that, behavior of the rabbits with malocclusion or without teeth is completely the same as with the bunnies with teeth.
More about malocclusion and rabbit teeth problems: http://rabbit.org/tag/malocclusion/
Music by: "Easy Lemon" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
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