Mastitis in Rabbits

Our experience with mastitis was no fun but had a good ending. We noticed momma doe didn’t want to let her 6 week old kits nurse. This is not abnormal but she was a little more aggressive in her actions. In picking her up, you could feel hard and lumpy areas on her underside that we knew was build up of milk. We suspected mastitis so we removed her from the litter. After a few days, the milk didn’t appear to be drying up. At this point we were certain it had turned into an infection. We tried squeezing the infection out the infected teet but it was really thick. It accumulated and made a large wound in the same area and it began to fester. We decided it was time to intervene.

Using a large needle that is made for injecting microchips, we lacerated the skin to remove the infection. The opening was probably only a cm long but opened on its own (to probably an inch) from squeezing out the nasty stuff inside. The pictures below shows photos taken the day after we opened the skin and removed a lot of the infection. We cleaned the wound with peroxide only and gave her an injection of Dura Pen once a day for three days. She had no ill reaction from this. However, I then read that we should have done every other day injections of Dura Pen. The dosage we used was 1/10 of a cc per pound. This was NOT a dosage from a vet, it was from an article we found on the internet as we were researching. We do not advise on using our story as medical advice. We only document how we treat our problems in our rabbitry and are NOT veterinarians.

This doe healed within a couple of days and was back to normal. The pictures look very gross but that was the worst day. She was a much happier bunny after a day or two! We sprayed peroxide on the wound twice a day from the day we opened until it closed completely and scabbed over with no more infection underneath. The wound looked completely healed within a weeks time! I believe we only gave three doses of Dura Pen total.

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