Epizootic Rabbit Enteropathy

Epizootic Rabbit Enteropathy (ERE) is a potentially lethal, little understood but very dangerous threat to a rabbit’s health. It is a fairly recent newcomer to American shores, though French rabbit farmers have been losing rabbits to ERE since 1996.

ERE can look very much like enterotoxemia or mucoid enteritis in a rabbit. But the difference is in part its contagiousness. This severe digestive disease is 'epizootic,' meaning it often strikes many rabbits in a rabbitry at once. And when it does, it still might hop-scotch randomly, here or there. Some rabbits might remain symptom-free, while rabbits round about them fall ill and die.

At particular risk seem to be growing fryers or overweight rabbits.

What does epizootic
rabbit enteropathy look like?

The most consistent sign is rumbling sounds in the abdomen of a stricken rabbit within a day of exposure. The abdomen becomes very distended, and mucoid droppings are eventually seen under the cage. Within 4-6 days, rabbits with ERE will exhibit most of the following symptoms, however which symptoms might vary:

• Cecal impaction
• Watery Diarrhea
• Distended abdomen
• Mucus excretion (after 4th day)
• No fever
  

The illness peaks in 4-6 days, and can last 2 weeks or more. If the rabbit is going to die, it will likely die between day 3 and day 5. Typical losses are 20-50% of the herd. Rabbits begin to recover by day 7, and recovery occurs slowly.

If you were to perform a necropsy of the dead rabbits, you might find an impaction 20-30% of the time. You’d find a tremendous lot of gas and liquid ballooning the stomach. You’d also find considerable distention of the small intestine with liquid and a bit of gas.

What you won’t find are any outward signs of inflammation or other lesions. There may be mild microscopic changes in the lining of the small intestine, but these are not evident to the naked eye.

In the studies performed, up to 40% of infected rabbits died, and 100% of study animals got sick. It didn’t seem to matter how much exposure a rabbit received, whether small or large. All rabbits exposed became equally sick and experienced the same mortality rates.
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In all these years, scientists have yet to identify the causative agent.

Nevertheless, this study strongly implicates bacteria as a cause and rules out viruses. But exactly which bacteria are the causative agents is still under discussion.

Scientists have identified rotavirus and Clostridium perfringens in all the 'inocula' taken from animals sick with ERE and used to infect the study rabbits. Researchers are still unsure of the role these germs play in the development of epizootic rabbit enteropathy without further study.

Thankfully these rabbits are completely healthy

Prevention and Treatment

Prevention:

• Always give hay to your rabbits! Especially to your young bunnies. If your herd or house bunny gets sick, hay or stemmy alfalfa doesn’t prevent or cure ERE, but it helps the infection work its way out of the body, helps prevent a fatal intestinal impaction, and may reduce fatalities.
  
  
• Don’t allow your adult rabbits to get fat. Limit their daily ration, letting their weight be the guide
  
  

What to do if your rabbits get ERE:

• Stop all pellets and switch the herd to hay ONLY, until the symptoms abate. This could take 2 weeks, possibly
  
  
• Get the help of a rabbit-savvy vet asap
  
  
• The ‘usual’ antibiotics may not work, but in some cases, rabbit breeders assert that the following drugs saved rabbit lives in their barns:
  

• Neomycin Sulfate
• Panacur
• Metronidazole for secondary clostridium infection (requires a vet prescription, BUT: check the comment titled "Metronidazole" below for a tip on obtaining without a prescription)


• Disinfecting the barn with chlorhexadine at least once a week may help prevent the spread of the disease

Share your own story below. How did your rabbits fare, and how did you treat the outbreak of epizootic rabbit enteropathy in your rabbits?