Her favorite toy

Today's weight: 1.34
Somehow she lost weight..
It may fluctuate but hopefully she will eat more!

Toys can be very expensive since rabbits destroy or soil it soon. At worst, your rabbit never touch the toy or not interested in the toy after sniffed one time.

In addition to that for the sanitary reason to fight parasites, I create disposable toys.
In the pictures, she plays with shoe box that I cut out a entrance for her. She do digging while she is inside the box so that the cardbox moves as she move around.

I also give her a toilet paper/kitchen paper core stuffed with hays. She loves it too!

Lap bun

She likes to climb up and jump down from my lap when I was sitting in a pen. It's like my lap is her favorite toy to play! She does not forget to lick my arms or foot during this play.

We are still fighting with parasites. Today, she was not happy when I approached her cage, she knew it's time for medicine. She thumped and did not come out!


According to wikipedia,
"Eimeria is a genus of Apicomplexan parasites that includes various species responsible for the poultry disease coccidiosis."

There are not too much information about Eimeria in house rabbit websites, but we can find a lots about coccidia. To kill oocysts, ammonia is the best. So I bought ammonia (which is hard to find) at the Wal-mart, and toss the carpet rug in the play area and installed vinyl (from Home Depot) so that we can wipe the playarea and cage.
Poochie is having hard time to run around on the vinyl since it's very slippery for her.
We put newspapers for her until she get used to it.

Today's weight: 1.36

Mended fence

I did extensive search for a perfect playpen:

- Midwest Exercise pen 24" high - Opening space is too big, around 40 dollar + shipping or local store $64

- All Living Things® Small Animal Playpen, 24" high, $41 but shipping is too expensive

-Marshall Pet Small Animal Pen "29 high, it's too high.... $69 at local store or $40 + shipping.
So, I decided to add something to the current playpen to prevent Poochie from sticking her face out.
I made trip to the Dollar Tree, and bought 5 sets of wire cooling rack. Total: $5

Then, I made rings from #18 nickel wire using a jewelry plyer to attach them to the pen.

It was great success since it does not look bad and the pen can be still foldaway.

Today's weight: 1.29

Pedigreed rabbit

Today's weight 1 lb 2.6 oz

It seems like she started gaining wait more faster. She gained 1 oz today.
The parasite in her intestine may have been preventing her to gain weight fast.
I think she is too small for 2 month old.
She looks funny almost like poodle when she is laying down stretching out.
I can see she is still skinny but her hair getting fluffy.
She has a lots of hair on her head and hindquarter.
This is typical for a double mane lionhead rabbit.
She is a pedigreed rabbit anyways!
The paper that breeder gave us includes her father, mother, grandparents, grand-grand parents, and grand-grand-grand parents.

She look like poodle!

Wrapped rabbit

It seems that the lice medicine is finally working. She is less scathing her head and body with her feet and not shaking body too much.
She hated medicine though, but she is a good girl today.
I wrap Poochie with towel like this picture while holding her and she is more calm.

She started eating more hay and pellets also. I hope she will get bigger.
But I worry that her pee has a lots of white residue which is calcium. I am giving her only timothy hay and pellets, sometime a small piece of fruits and vegetable. The pellets contains some Alphalpha, which may contain more calcium. I am considering to switch to Timothy pellets, but she is still very young...

Today's' weight : 1lb 1.6 oz




She is such a good girl!

In search of playpen

We use our handmade playpen made from wire shelf system.
We connected the wire panels of 14" (which was on sale at Walmart like $15) with book binder coils ($.15 each from school supply store).
We even painted the wire panels with bamboo color so that it looks nice!

Our late rabbit liked it except he moved it with his mouth and escaped.
We had to tie the ends to the cage so that it will not move open.

Anyways, to our surprise, this baby rabbit also do the same thing.
She tries to move the panel by her mouse exactly the same way!

But there is a more serious problem.
Since she has such a small head she can stick her head through the wire opening completely!
It freaks me out since she may be stuck in there, and panic and choke someday.

We started to look for a better playpen with smaller openings. I found a couple of them they all not in desirable size (or color).


I found this one, which is 29 inch tall and it was too tall. I want to touch her while sitting down outside of the cage.

The ideal size is around 18" high and there is one in the Petco but it has still wide openings and too heavy to move it around.




"I want to get out!!"

Food

We give her unlimited pellets and hay since she is still 8 weeks old.
She weighs only 1lb 1.6 oz. and the parasite may be affecting her nutrition intake.
She is eating fine but I am wondering she could be bigger.

I give her a couple of salad leaf (Organic) and a tiny piece of banana sometimes.
She seems like enjoying it, but not so crazy about it...

She is still scratching her face and body and shaking her head sometimes.
I think that there are still lice on her.

We clean her cage every day and remove feces as often as possible.
I wonder if the medicine is working..
The breeder said she checked her rabbits but no one was infected.
If it's true, where are the parasites come from?

My last rabbit died 10 days before Poochie come to our home.
We cleaned cage and the late rabbit did not have anything as far as we know.
I don't think if the parasite can survive that long without host.

Eimeria

In the last vet visit, we brought Poochie's stool samples and the vet sent them to a lab.

Last Friday, the vet called to tell us that they found parasites called Eimeria.
It lives in the intestine of rabbit.

I was baffled because this is the second problem we found about this bun.
See, we bought the Poochie from a rabbit breeder and I thought that it's more safer and we can find healthy rabbits.
After the sad experience with the last rabbit we had, we went extra miles to find breeder to get rabbit. But after all, breeders not always perfect.
I will write about our late rabbit stories some day.

Anyways, the vet gave us a medicine that should be given twice a day using syringe.

I hold Poochie and push a tiny syringe tip into her mouth, but she hates it....

Now, we have to clean her cage and litter box (which she uses as only her bed) thoroughly with hot water.
After much research on the Internet, I figured that we should clean the cage and accessories using hot water to kill the bugger.

There are not much information on the Internet about how to clean up and how often we should disinfect cages.

Sweet girl

Here is the movie of her eating pellets. She put her paws on the edge of bowl! How cute!

She is very affectionate. This morning, she licked my hand for the first time.
I was cleaning up her pee and she started licking my fingers.
It may be the face cream left on my fingers that attracted her.... I thought.

But later at night, she licked the sole of daddy's feet!
Eek!
It's very funny.

I know not all bunnies like to lick because they are not dogs.
But some rabbits do as ways to show affection.
When they lick you, they are grooming you.

First vet visit

Today, we went to the Vet with Poochie.
This is the initial checkup and we asked questions about her head turning.
The vet said Poochie does not have wry neck and it may be caused by stress.
We noticed Poochie does not do the movement so often anymore so it's good news.

But she found rabbit lice on her... the vet applied medicine and we had have to clean the cage when we went home. We washed everything in bath tub and scrubbed well.
It was a lot of work!