Rabbit injury, now infected

[RJSchaefer]

My beautiful NZ buck was attacked by another buck when I stupidly put them all in a colony setting**. He was castrated. Now the area is infected, not horrifically but getting worse, and he needs to be culled. I won't spend too much on treating him since it will probably be futile and I don't need another buck (he was supposed to be a doe, sexing woops). Trying to stay detached and objective.

Do we cull and process, or cull and discard? He's a sizable rabbit. I hate to waste the meat. I'm considering skinning, tanning that, and discarding his lower half.

Should I wait until I get in to see how bad the infection is? Or just cull, skin and discard?

** To anyone who has read any of the articles out there talking about keeping bucks together, the people writing them must have some amazingly chill bucks. My bucks were together for 48 hours and were fighting constantly.

 

[Bunnylady]

I would see how much infection is there after you do him in. Rabbits have a pretty good ability to wall off infection, so it may not involve a very large area

Sorry about your buck. I've seen a few of that kind of injury when I left young bucks together with their brothers too long. I've seen rabbit bucks come flying up out of multi-rabbit carriers at shows making the fur fly when someone put two bucks next to each other - I agree, putting more than one buck in a colony is asking for trouble.

 

[RJSchaefer]

The infection was really bad. It didn't seem bad from the outside, but I think it was intrusive.

We removed him from his cage at about 4PM. He was totally fasted from then on out in anticipation of slaughter. We slaughtered at 7:30PM. When I got in there to start removing organs (my first time, was rather a bad experience for it), his bladder was 100% full, almost about to bust. His stomach was also entirely full, as were his entrails. His entrails would not come out completely, as if they were stuck.

We followed a tutorial video that had a method we really appreciated. We skinned him, but left the hind area attached due to the infection. When it came time to finish up, my boyfriend clipped that so we could assess what meat was good and what wasn't. Infected matter came out his vent. I think the infection had perforated it all - hence the full bladder and stomach, despite 3.5 hours of fasting.

We discarded the area from the hip back and retained the rest. Poor bunny. =(

 

[Bunnylady]

Rabbits can be surprisingly brutal, can't they?

I'm glad you were able to at least end his suffering,