Preventing Urine Scald with Disabled Bunnies

By Pam Hurley

Do you have a pet rabbit whose disability prevents it from keeping its urine from soaking its fur and/or skin? This can be a serious problem for people with disabled rabbits. Some people can keep their bunny clean with frequent changing of the material that he is sitting on, along with washing and drying his hind end and sides several times a day. This, though, isn’t feasible for people who are not available for long hours. In our experience, even when we were available every 4 hours to clean, the rabbit still lost its fur and developed urine scald.

These past few months we found a three-layer method that appears to work, at least for the two rabbits with which we tried it. Sigi, the featured rabbit in our last newsletter, spent his first few months sitting on his butt due to a spinal injury. Within a few days of coming home from the hospital, he started losing all his hind end fur and was quickly heading toward urine scald. However, once we had all the materials and began using this new method, his fur dried quickly and grew back within days. Sunflower, who had severe head tilt, never had wet fur with this three-layer system.

The first layer includes use of a pee pad, either washable or paper. They can be obtained from selected pet stores or online. Two such websites are ezwelp.com and personallypaws.com. Personally Paws usually has wider variety of sizes and colors, whereas EZwhelp has choices in two thicknesses as well as round ones. The large round ones fit into 5-foot hard plastic swimming pools that people often use as an easy, washable floor for rabbits when their home base is an exercise pen. The two-ply thickness pads are cheaper than the three-ply and work very well for rabbits.

The second layer is a slotted plastic layer thick enough to separate the top layer from the bottom layer. The slots or holes allow urine to drip onto the pad below. Garage drainage tiles with slots work quite well. They can be found online or in a hardware store such as Home Depot or Lowes. Eighteen-inch square Easy Tile Versa Floor is one type that can be used.

The third or top layer is a thick, one sided fleece layer, usually with a tight webbing material on the bottom side. The thicker ones help keep the fluid away easier than the thinner ones. Three examples are pet pads, vet bedding (the super deluxe has a tighter, thicker pile), and Profleece (Ultimate Vet Bedding is also a better quality) The fleece is washable and we found it kept the rabbits so dry that they didn’t have to be bathed often (except for removing cecotropes).

If your rabbit chews the fleece, he may be able to sit directly on a nonabsorbent tile or something similar if the holes are such that he is unlikely to catch a nail or have sore hocks. Neither of our rabbits chewed the fleece. Our head tilt bunny, Sunflower (pictured, above), used the setup while she was recovering. She was in a large plastic bottomed cage with the 3-layer bottom and rolled towels on the sides of the cage (she was not rolling at this point of her recovery).

A note for rabbits that already have urine scald:

For bunnies so immobile that they can no longer groom themselves, we found that Desitin works very well. It is a skin barrier cream that has zinc oxide, so it cannot be used on rabbits that can groom it off.

Edward, a disabled bunny that was on his side for his last 6 months had lost much of his fur on one hind side, but never got urine scald because of the Desitin. He could not groom it off, so it was safe. We tried another skin barrier film called Cavilon No Sting Barrier Film by 3M. It works well enough, but Edward preferred the Desitin. Some people have recommended Bag Balm and CAL/ECH. Both are in a petrolatum lanolin base, so check with your vet to see if they are safe on your bunny’s skin if they cannot reach and groom themselves there. CAL/ECH is a homeopathic ointment that contains Calendula and Echinacea.

For grooming bunnies that already have urine scald, the choices are more limited. CarraVet acemannan wound gel is good for wound healing. It contains aloe vera and is safer for grooming rabbits, although a rabbit can lick it off fairly quickly. When Arwen had severe urine scald, we tried this, but she removed it so quickly that our only option was to place her in a cart with her hind end away from her urine until the urine scald healed. We also tried diapers with Arwen. These work well if you change them often. For Arwen, dog diapers were better than baby diapers because we did not have to cut a hole for the tail. The pads inside are removable, so they can be changed. We recommend using human incontinence liners such as Poise, Always Discreet or Tena. These are more absorbent and slightly wider than the pads that come with dog diapers. We did find we needed to change these quite often because poop and cecotropes would collect in them. 

These are just a few options you can try with disabled rabbits that are developing urine scald. For more suggestions, there is a disabled rabbit group on Facebook; the members of the group are very helpful and supportive. You will need to get permission from the moderator to join.

Disabled Rabbits Group on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/201759429869484/