About treatment
Day One, Day Two, and Every Day After
Caring for rescue animals is demanding, but we experience every new arrival together. Whenever possible, we try to find out as much as we can about the animal. But then a pregnant female rabbit arrives after being found wandering around Prague, and you don’t even know how old she is.
First, the rescue animal always goes into quarantine, whether they were caught outdoors or handed over by an owner. The reason is simple. RHDV (Rabbit Hemorrhagic Disease), myxomatosis, E. cuniculi, pasteurella, and other diseases that are transmissible through the air, surfaces, or clothing are extremely dangerous and infectious for rabbits even before the first symptoms appear. Personally, during these days, I even wear special clothes around the new rescue, which I don’t wear among my own rabbits afterwards. After every handling, I wash my hands and face, and of course, I don’t let my own rabbits into the spaces where the rescue animal moves.
If their health status allows, I try to let the rescue animal acclimate a bit and get used to me before taking them to the vet. Of course, if they need treatment right away, I don’t hesitate. However, it is always better if the animal trusts you at least a little bit at the doctor’s office. At that point, it is a huge relief once I hear that the rescue animal is healthy and we can offer them for adoption.
Before adoption, we also arrange for neutering/spaying (if the animal’s age allows) and vaccination, and then we are already packing their little backpacks for their new homes.
They are not all the same
Unfortunately, not all cases go smoothly. Recently, our Myšák left for adoption; we took him in with acute rhinitis and treated it for over half a year. Then there is Elík, who has had dental problems since he was a baby and decided he was just never going to eat again. In contrast to these two, someone like Dory, who lost her leg after a nasty fracture, healed very quickly and went up for adoption much faster than we all initially anticipated.
And then there are those who need their souls healed. I took in Bonie, who was extremely terrified of hands and would squeak the moment I just got close to her. To this day, we don’t know what she must have gone through in the past. It took some work, but she left for her new home as a happy female rabbit who acclimated very quickly and became the queen of the household. It took Bonie a week before she gathered the courage to come out of her cage, and back then, that felt like an extremely long time—until I brought home Silver. She had lived her whole life in a single square meter inside a rabbit hutch, giving birth to litters, until she was no longer useful. After two weeks, during a trip to the emergency vet, I found out why. Acute uterine inflammation with bleeding and a nasty tumor. Before the poor girl could even look around and acclimate, I already had to pump her full of meds, drag her to check-ups and surgery, and force-feed her. This took a heavy toll on our relationship, and it took her a month before she ventured out of her cage and started exploring the space available to her. I had her with me for almost a year before she found the absolute best home for her.
Every bunny is special, and every single one receives the best care we are capable of providing so they can go home healthy and with their hearts in their paws.
Promises vs. reality
‘No, she is completely healthy,’ ‘he doesn’t have any health issues,’ or ‘we aren’t aware of any medical problems.’ We read sentences like these in messages quite often when arranging the intake of a new shelter animal. But the reality? That is a bit different.
I don’t want to generalize and lump everyone together; some rabbits truly are healthy and fine, but the ones that stick in your mind the most are those that aren’t.
Coccidiosis, overgrown nails, diarrhea, or poor eating habits don’t faze us anymore. We have proven procedures for handling shelter animals during their first days and resolving these issues. But then we find ourselves dealing with a severely malnourished animal (800g compared to 1.5kg), an emergency spay within a week of intake because a female rabbit is bleeding, or an eating disorder—and we are already dreading what will come out of it this time.
I always just ask myself whether it’s human ignorance or a deliberate attempt to get rid of a sick animal because it would cost money.
A SPECIALIST? THE CHEAPEST VET
Social media is full of questions about where to take a rabbit for vet care so it won’t be expensive. Our experience? It never pays off to go to a general veterinarian. They will only perform a lot of useless tests and won’t help; on the contrary, they can cause a lot of harm. Oliverek and Brumíček could tell you all about it. A vet failed to notice or treat the sore hocks on Oliverek’s hind paws, so it went so far that his legs began to necrotize, and due to weakness, one broke—which was treated with just a ‘splint’ and ointment. He must have suffered in unimaginable pain, but he didn’t give up; he kept eating and cuddling as soon as he came into our care. And that is why we fought for him too. Brumíček broke his front paw, and his original owner wasted a lot of money on unqualified vets who said the fracture would heal on its own, until it developed such a nasty infection that he also lost his paw.
So no, it is not a good idea to look at the price of a vet, because a specialist knows what to look for, how to look for it, and how to treat it. It might cost a few hundred crowns more, but you won’t be wasting money on nonsense tests or unnecessary and ineffective treatment that often only makes the problem worse. First and foremost, look at the doctor’s expertise, and if you are lucky enough to have more than one truly good specialist in your area, only then can you start looking at the price.
TIME, MONEY, AND MENTAL TOLL?
We are incredibly grateful to everyone that when it comes to treating our shelter animals, we don’t have to decide whether we can afford the treatment or not. And we can only do this thanks to the donations people send to our transparent bank account. Without them, we wouldn’t be able to achieve even 10% of what we do and will continue to do. Thank you all so much!
However, caring for a sick animal isn’t just about it being expensive; it is also extremely time-consuming. And that is where the contributions of our foster parents come in. They dedicate their time to us—and it is no small amount—when they take a rescue to the vet every week, administer medication several times a day, monitor them, force-feed them, and take care of them. They carve all this time out of their free time, their hobbies, and their family time. They have our endless admiration.
But we mustn’t forget perhaps the most important aspect, and that is the mental resilience we all have to show. We feel helplessness, fear, and despair. We hope we are doing enough and that we won’t neglect anything, because for that sick little bundle of fur, it could have fatal consequences. We consult with others over every little thing and feel like we’re losing our minds, because normally we wouldn’t stress over it, but with a sick animal—one we often barely even know—we genuinely address absolutely everything. And we all take it very hard when a shelter animal or an adopted bunny leaves us, but we know we cannot let it crush us. It hurts, we feel grief, injustice, and helplessness; personally, I weep for every single one of them, even though I might seem like an ice queen to others. Since I was a child, I was taught not to show my emotions. In those moments, I replay all the lives we have saved, and I am thankful for every single one of them.
A happy ending at the rescue
I admit that we have very few of these cases, but some animals simply cannot be put up for adoption. Currently, this applies to Oliverek and Koblížek. Both face demanding and costly treatment in the future with an uncertain timeline, so they have been placed in our shelter permanently. We could not, in good conscience, put them up for adoption and watch their new owners sacrifice everything for them.