Trends in premature death in pet rabbits

Abstract

A pet rabbit can reach the age between 8 and 12 years, when given the proper care [5,6,13,17]. In the Netherlands, the average age of pet rabbits is between 3 and 4.5 (±0,3) years of age [4,5]. The Veterinary Pathology Diagnostic Centre (VPDC) of the Veterinary Medicine Faculty at Utrecht University started a 3 year lasting research on 1 October 2009, the “Welfare research small mammals”. To investigate the causes of death in young pet rabbits and evaluates options to expand the average age of rabbits, guinea pigs, rats and ferrets. This paper evaluates the results of the rabbits submitted to this project from November 2010 to February 2011. 38 young deceased rabbits between the ages 2 to 36 months old were submitted for necropsy. The owners of the deceased rabbit and the treating veterinarian provided zootechnical information, which was compared with the results of the pathological results. 11 hypotheses were answered. Results show that most rabbits died of an infectious agent and that none of the rabbits which were vaccinated against VHD and myxomatosis died of these diseases. There is also evidence that there is a relationship between housing rabbits individually and lung infections, the number 1 cause of death in this study. And that the pathological diagnosis didn’t correspond with the veterinarian diagnosis. In this study, results show that there are more factors responsible for the early death of pet rabbits. Recommendations for the owners of pet rabbits and for veterinarians who work with rabbits were made based on the results of this research and on the literature study