Your vet will usually recommend sedating or anaesthetising the rabbit so that the maggots can be removed manually. This condition can be fatal so time is of the essence. However, under their fur and skin will be many more. Often you may only see one or two on the surface of the skin, or in the hutch. If you see any evidence of maggots on your rabbit then we recommend that you contact your vet straight away. Obesity or mobility problems lead to poor grooming and this can also predisposes your rabbits to fly strike.įlystrike is an emergency situation. Lack of clean accommodation allows faeces and caecotrophs (the droppings that rabbits need to eat for a healthy gut) to stick to the skin. These problems are all preventable with careful management. Long teeth, digestive problems and wounds put rabbits at risk of getting dirty bottoms, which attract flies. Animals become infested when they pass through contaminated areas, and the eggs hatch in response to heat form a nearby host.Rabbits can develop dirty fur around their bottoms for several reasons. Instead of depositing eggs on skin soiled with urine or excrement, females deposit eggs near the entrance to a rabbit burrow or near an outdoor rabbit hutch. Myiasis cause by larvae of the Cuterebra flies is slightly different because their flystrike is not linked to poor hygiene. While not usual, the common house fly ( Musca domestica) and other flies in the order Diptera can also cause flystrike when it lays eggs in matted fur coated in feces, and the hatched maggots rapidly move to an infected wound. (Western hemisphere only, also known as warble fly, wolf worm, and warbles). Species that cause flystrike in rabbits include the blowflies (the green bottle flies Lucilia sericata and the blue bottle flies Calliphora sp.), the grey flesh fly Wohlfahrtia sp., the common screwworm fly Callitroga sp., and from the botfly Cuterebra sp. It is caused by several types of insects that will lay eggs in the wounded skin of mammals, and the maggots hatching from the eggs then digest living tissue. Make sure that your rabbit is consuming appropriate amounts of hay and other roughage as well as water to keep their digestive tract free of fur.įlystrike, also known as fly strike or myiasis, is a potentially fatal disease that is common in the warmer months of the year. Please regularly groom your rabbit to minimize the amount of hair that the rabbit can ingest to prevent GI stasis from occurring. If the bald spots show red irritation or excessive dandruff instead of healthy plain pink skin, then there may be a health issue going on instead of simple molting, and a rabbit-savvy vet visit should be scheduled if there is no improvement in a few days. It is also common for a "tide mark" to develop with obvious delineations of old and new fur as the rabbit molts. Bald spots are common at this time, and fur should start to grow in within 7-10 days. It usually occurs twice a year during spring and fall. Molting is a natural process that occurs 2-3 times a year where a rabbit sheds his entire old coat to expose the new.
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