The rabbit problems built in at birth: lop ears, dwarf skulls, giant frames and Rex coats

Quick answer

The ear base of a lop is the highest-value thing to look at on this rabbit, and the thing most owners never think to check.

Most of the chronic disease a pet rabbit gets is written into its body shape before it is born. A folded ear cannot drain wax. A shortened skull cannot fit continuously growing teeth. A heavy frame loads feet that have no pads. A Rex coat leaves those feet unprotected.

None of that means these rabbits are bad pets. It means the checks that matter are different for each of them, and the schedule below is built around body shape rather than around age.

• Lop rabbits need their ear canals examined, not just their ear flaps looked at.
• Dwarf and flat-faced breeds need their cheek teeth checked, and a conscious look in the mouth only sees the front of it.
• Giant and Rex rabbits need their hocks inspected weekly, because pressure sores start under intact fur.
• Wool breeds need clipping on a schedule, not grooming when they look untidy.
• A weekly weight is the cheapest screening test in existence and it catches all of these earlier than looking does.

Decide in 60 seconds

Lop ears: the drainage problem

The lop mutation changes the cartilage so the ear flops rather than standing. It does not stop there. The change continues into the ear canal, which becomes narrowed and often kinked where the ear folds over at the base.

A normal rabbit's ear canal is a wide, near-vertical tube. Wax and shed skin migrate outward and fall away. Air moves through it and it stays dry.

Fold the ear and you close the lid on that system. Wax accumulates in the horizontal part of the canal, packs down, and forms a plug. The environment underneath becomes warm, humid and airless, which is exactly what opportunistic bacteria need.

From there the progression is predictable. Wax build-up, then inflammation of the canal lining, then infection, then thickening of the canal wall which narrows it further, then rupture of the eardrum, then middle ear disease, then inner ear disease with head tilt and loss of balance. Along the way, an abscess can form at the ear base, which in rabbits is a solid mass of thick, cheese-like pus that will not drain and usually needs surgical removal.

The unsettling part is how quiet the early stages are. Work comparing lop-eared and erect-eared pet rabbits has found lops much more likely to have narrowed canals, visible wax accumulation and pain when the ears and mouth are examined, often in animals whose owners had reported no problem at all.

What to actually do.

Look at the ear opening in daylight weekly. You are checking for discharge at the entrance, a smell, crusting, and whether the rabbit objects to the base of the ear being gently touched.

Ask for an otoscope examination of the canal at every routine vet visit, and say the word lop. A visual check of the ear flap tells you nothing about the canal.

Watch for behaviour rather than discharge: head shaking, scratching that keeps returning to one side, tilting the head slightly when eating, becoming grumpy about head strokes, or grooming one side of the face less.

If disease is found, imaging matters. Computed tomography shows the canal, the bulla and the tooth roots together, and in lops the ear and dental problems very often turn out to be the same problem seen from two angles.

Long-eared breeds have a second, simpler issue. Ears that reach the floor get trodden on, caught in doors, dragged through litter trays and torn. Check the ear tips for soiling and injury as part of the same weekly look.

Dwarf and flat-faced skulls: the tooth problem

Hay is the wear mechanism. A rabbit that eats greens and pellets enthusiastically and leaves the hay is showing you a dental problem before any tooth is visible.

Every tooth in a rabbit's mouth grows continuously throughout life. They stay the right length only because the upper and lower teeth grind against each other, and that grinding only happens properly during the long, sideways chewing that fibrous hay demands.

Selective breeding for a short, round, appealing face shortens the bones of the skull. It does not shorten the teeth, and it does not change how fast they grow.

The result is a mismatch. The lower jaw sits forward relative to the upper, the incisors no longer meet edge to edge and curl instead of wearing, and the cheek teeth develop sharp points, called spurs, on the tongue side below and the cheek side above.

Those spurs cut. A rabbit with cheek tooth spurs has ulcers on its tongue and the inside of its cheeks, and chewing hurts. It shifts to soft food, which requires less grinding, which means the teeth wear even less, which makes the spurs worse. The loop closes.

The staging owners can actually see.

Early: hay intake falls while pellets and greens are still eaten enthusiastically. The rabbit may take a mouthful of hay and drop it. Caecotrophs stop being eaten and stick to the bottom, because reaching round to take them from the anus is uncomfortable.

Established: weight starts to fall. The chin and front paws are damp from saliva. One eye weeps constantly. There may be a subtle change in face shape.

Late: a firm swelling along the jaw or beneath the eye from a tooth root abscess, complete loss of appetite, and gut stasis, which is the thing that actually kills.

The tear duct connection.

The roots of the upper incisors run right alongside the nasolacrimal duct. As a root elongates in the wrong direction it presses on the duct and blocks it. Tears then run down the face instead of draining into the nose.

This is why a rabbit with a permanently weepy eye and no eye injury has a dental problem until proven otherwise, and why treating it with eye drops alone never works.

The failure mode of the usual advice.

Owners are frequently told that a vet has checked the rabbit's teeth. In a conscious rabbit, with the mouth held open by hand or with a small otoscope cone, the incisors and the very front of the cheek teeth can be seen. The back of the mouth cannot.

A genuine cheek tooth examination needs sedation or anaesthesia, and often imaging. If your rabbit has a flat face, is losing weight, has a wet chin or a weepy eye, and a conscious examination found nothing, that finding does not settle the question. Say so and ask what a sedated examination would add.

And the prevention.

Unlimited grass hay, all the time, everywhere the rabbit rests. It is not a fibre supplement, it is the mechanism that keeps the teeth the right length. No amount of chew toy replaces the sideways grinding action of hay.

Flat-faced breeds also have narrowed nasal passages, so they snuffle more, tolerate heat less well, and are more prone to respiratory infection. Noisy breathing in a dwarf or lionhead is worth mentioning to a vet rather than accepting as a breed characteristic.

Giants and Rex coats: the feet problem

Rabbits have no paw pads. Where a dog or cat has thick keratinised pads, a rabbit has skin covered in fur, resting directly over the bones of the hock.

Pododermatitis, usually called sore hocks, starts when that fur is worn thin at the pressure point. The skin underneath reddens, then hardens, then breaks. Once broken it can become infected, and infection over a hock can reach the bone, at which point treatment becomes long, expensive and sometimes unsuccessful.

Three things drive it, and breed sits behind all three.

Weight. A Continental Giant or French Lop concentrates several times a dwarf's body mass onto feet that are not proportionally larger. Obesity in any breed does the same thing.

Coat. Rex rabbits lack the normal long guard hairs. Their plush coat is beautiful and it is thin exactly where thickness is protective. Rex and mini Rex rabbits develop sore hocks earlier, and on flooring that other rabbits tolerate.

Surface. Wire floors are the classic cause and should never be used. Bare tile, thin plastic trays, concrete, and matted damp bedding are the slower versions. Damp is a multiplier: urine-soaked fur macerates skin and accelerates everything.

What to do.

Turn the rabbit gently or lift each foot and look at the underside of the hock weekly. You are looking for fur thinning, a shiny bald patch, redness, hard yellow-grey callus, or any break in the skin.

Give deep, dry, soft, non-slip resting surfaces. Thick bedding, seagrass mats, fleece over a non-slip base, and enough of them that the rabbit is never resting on hard floor.

Keep litter trays clean, because a rabbit that sits in wet litter is standing its feet in ammonia.

Manage weight seriously in heavy breeds, and remember that a giant rabbit that cannot reach its own bottom to eat caecotrophs will accumulate soiling, and soiling in warm weather is how flystrike starts.

Giant breeds carry other costs worth knowing about before buying one. They develop arthritis younger, they generally live shorter lives than small breeds, they need proportionally larger housing, litter trays and carriers, and heart disease is described in them.

They are also the rabbits most at risk from bad handling. A rabbit's powerful hind limbs against a spine that is proportionally light can fracture that spine during a single struggle, and the heavier the rabbit, the harder it is to support properly. Giant rabbits should be handled at floor level or with full body support, and are frequently better served by never being picked up at all.

Wool breeds and other inherited traps

Angora and other wool breeds.

Their coat grows continuously and does not shed out in the normal way. Without clipping every few months it mats to the skin, and matted wool causes the same skin damage described elsewhere in this guide plus severe heat intolerance.

Wool ingestion during grooming also contributes to gut slowdown. Angoras are a several-hours-a-month commitment, and that should be a decision made before purchase.

Lionheads.

The mane and, in some lines, the skirt need regular attention, and lionheads also frequently carry dwarf skull conformation, so they combine the coat commitment with the dental risk.

The dwarf gene itself.

The true dwarfing gene is lethal when a kit inherits two copies. Those kits, known as peanuts, are born much smaller and do not survive. This is a breeding consideration rather than an owner one, but it is the reason two dwarf rabbits should never be bred together casually.

Broken and spotted patterns.

A single copy of the spotting gene, as in this broken pattern, causes no problem at all. It is only the double dose, produced by mating two spotted rabbits, that carries the megacolon risk.

In spotted lines, rabbits inheriting two copies of the spotting gene can develop megacolon syndrome: chronically abnormal droppings, poor gut motility, intermittent bloat and poor growth, caused by abnormal development of the nerve supply to the gut.

If you have a mostly white, heavily spotted rabbit with lifelong intermittent diarrhoea, oddly shaped droppings and repeated bloating that nobody can explain, this is worth raising with a rabbit-experienced vet by name.

Malocclusion as an inherited trait.

Beyond skull shape, jaw misalignment is itself heritable in some lines. A rabbit whose incisors were wrong from the first months, rather than becoming wrong after years of a low-hay diet, is showing a genetic problem and should not be bred from.

The screening schedule, by body shape

A flat scale, a notebook and two minutes a week. The weight line moves before anything else does.

What never to do

Do not flush or pour anything into a lop rabbit's ear canal before it has been examined. If the eardrum is perforated, the fluid reaches the middle ear.

Do not cut or clip a rabbit's overgrown incisors with clippers or nail cutters. Rabbit teeth shatter and split down into the root, causing abscesses. Burring under sedation is the correct method.

Do not accept a permanently weepy eye as a breed feature in a flat-faced rabbit. It is a tear duct blocked by a tooth root until someone proves otherwise.

Do not house any rabbit on wire flooring, and do not assume a thin layer of litter in a plastic tray is an adequate resting surface for a heavy or Rex-coated rabbit.

Do not restrict hay in an attempt to make a rabbit eat pellets or greens. Hay is the mechanism that keeps the teeth the right length.

Do not lift a giant rabbit without full support of the hindquarters, and do not persist with a rabbit that struggles. Put it down and try another way.

Do not breed two rabbits with the same extreme feature: two dwarfs, two spotted rabbits, or two rabbits with any history of malocclusion.

Do not assume an older rabbit's decline is age. In rabbits, most of what looks like ageing is dental pain, arthritis, or an ear that has been quietly infected for a year.

When to get help

Go the same day for a head tilt, loss of balance, an eye that will not close, a rabbit that has stopped eating, no droppings for several hours, or a rabbit sitting hunched and unresponsive.

Book within the week for a wet chin or damp front paws, a permanently weeping eye, head shaking or ear scratching, a firm lump along the jaw or under the eye, thinning fur or redness on a hock, or weight that has fallen across two weigh-ins.

Ask directly for an otoscopic ear examination in a lop, and for a discussion of sedated dental examination in a flat-faced rabbit whose symptoms do not match a conscious check.

Bring these to the appointment: the dated weight log, the breed and adult weight, photographs of the hocks and of any discharge, what the rabbit actually eats in a day with the hay and pellet proportions, the flooring and bedding it rests on, how long the sign has been present, and whether anything has changed in the environment.

For a lop with any ear or dental sign, ask what imaging would add before agreeing to a course of treatment. Ear and tooth root disease in these rabbits frequently turn out to be one problem, and finding that out early changes the whole plan.