We have adopted a 12 yr old senior bun about 1.5 years ago and have been struggling with a condition where scabs form around her lips. She does not have any scabs anywhere else but her lips. We have finally found a solution to her problem and just wanted to share this info with any other bun parents who’s buns are suffering from this.
When we first got her, her lips were totally normal, the scabs only appeared a couple months in. When we go on vacations, we leave our buns with my parents and have noticed that her lips start healing within the first days of being there. I was sure it had to be allergies.
We have brought her to several different vets who were perplexed about her conditions thinking it could be mites we treated her with revolution and ivermectin. That did not work. We have also tried treating her for rabbit syphilis (unusual because she didn’t have any scabs on her genitals and the other buns did not catch anything from her) with penicillin and that did not work. We also tried using a hibitane solution thinking it was bacterial, still no luck. We also tried baytril with no improvements.
Being sure that it was allergies, we tried changing everything in her pen. We changed the dog pen to one that is coated with plastic, changed the source of hay, changed her pellets, took certain veggies away one at a time, changed the water dish, changed the bedding (our rabbit is incontinent), changed her toys, changed the location of her pen, and basically everything you can think of. Still no improvements. We even tried giving her benedryl for children and that did only minimal improvements.
We were finally giving up and thinking there was no cure for her, we just decided to keep removing the scabs and try to keep the mouth area as clean as possible.
I tried to figure out what difference my parents do when they have her and my mom says that she really cleans the veggies she gives them by soaking them in water and soap and rinsing it out several times.
We first tried taking all her veggies away, and her mouth scabs disappeared in about 2 days. We were ecstatic.
We tried just soaking the veggies for a couple minutes and rinsing it out but her scabs came back, not as bad but it came back.
We then tried soaking the veggies over night with some dish soap and rinsing the veggies out very well after, and her mouth has been virtually scab free since doing this.
Our guess is that our bun has an allergy to the pesticides that are in the veggies.
Anyways, hopefully this method helps any buns out there that are suffering from the same thing. After spending loads of money at the vet and on medicine, it was as simple as soaking her veggies and rinsing it out very well that worked.