I thank you for, this is webinar on, how to practically approach, small mammal skin disease. We always tell when entice is practical, there's gonna be little science involved, but a lot of, opinion. So go concentrating on rabbits and rodents here.
But there will be some diversions into some of the much more unusual, small mammals we see as well, again, a quick announcement that, information on these, odd species is actually would say, odd species, but, different species is really increasing. And I'm glad to say there was a BS, a B man on guinea pigs. coming up very soon.
So, how to investigate the investigation takes several steps. It's history. Taking is really important.
Then a full clinical examination. I think it's very easy to dwell on the skin with these, but actually, very often this is a marker of other problems, and there's lots of underlying factors we'll be exploring today. And, then we need to move on to the dermatological examination after that.
Now, to help get diagnosed, we may take some samples. If I was doing that, too. We'll discuss a few of those, and hopefully we have a diagnosis.
And then hopefully we have therapy or management of the condition. So what we probably we have with these is actually knowing what's normal. And here we have a guinea pig.
We're a skinny pig. And the skinny pig has been bred to be that way. It is technically normal that but the skin itself does have issues because it's not designed to be without fur.
So we very often have these who actually being quite greasy, and and and sometimes being a bit more prone to skin infection stuff because that is not really adapted to be with that further, but bear in mind. Sometimes we do have some. The variations really have been brilliant.
We may see things presented very commonly. For example, not unusual to have male hamsters present with a bilateral aec here. In this case, too, may have impacted scent gland.
Just visible there. And that's is that normal, is it not? It's probably a little bit infected in this case, but, you know, So we will see, swelling.
That can be a problem. Suddenly we just see plain alopecia like this and again. Not necessarily that abnormal in the older hamster or requiring treatment.
So what can we get from history? Because we get some major clues from this. Certainly with signal.
That's really important. You know what species? What breed?
I do say special species, because when we're doing something with very unusual rodents, we do need to know what they are. But what breed they are, You know, age is really important. The the sex of the animal again do check it because mistakes happen.
And especially with a small rodent. So So do check that, too. A.
And you know that that that's that those are quite critical. Husbandry is really important as well. You know, where they're being kept, how they're being kept, what substrate's being used.
What issues might be going on within that that might lead to to potential skin problems or irritation. And that's that's quite effective. And diet, very rarely when we see things like dietary allergy and stuff.
And I'm not convinced I ever really have, but certainly it may lead to other issues that that cause problems that may drive skin signs from there. We Macy's slightly like recent changes. In in any of those, that might might precipitate something.
So have have Vienna just moved. Has there been a mixing of a group, affecting the social structure? Have there been all kinds of things going on there, too?
And we also wanna know. You know what species are affect, are involved, you know? Are there other?
Are there are there? Are there animals in that person's connection, if you like from a keep mixed rodent species or whatever not always together, but sitting in the same room and go from one place to the other. So could we be transmission or something?
And are the owners affected? We'll talk a little bit more about those cases later on. So we are looking not just at what the presenting sign is.
And what presenting disease is We're looking very much for underlying causes as well. And that may be something we got myiasis we've got We've got a fly strike. Very common parasitic, disease, damaging the skin.
Technically, therefore it does become a skin parasite. But we know we've got underlying problems with that. If we see that there is an issue going on and we know if we see a R.
But with that, we're going to have to investigate much deeper as to why it's got the faecal build up around it. That may be a horary factor, but very commonly internal factors like arthritis and and and, and and zika troph issues. And that and dental problems.
Sometimes, too, that may cause problems. See some increase in some large teeth here in a guinea pig. But actually, all about family history of rodents.
One of the big things we may see as a first presenting sign of, dental disease is very poor, grooming and was self barbering. It means bald patch appearing like he sta and that can be a very good sign of dental disease and inability to groom properly. So do watch out for those, and those are things you need to get hand blonde, both for treatment effort.
He also actually getting the answers. Correct. We do see a lot of parasitic disease, and we're dwelling on that quite a bit today, and to investigate those.
We do different things to have a look for them, so definitely have a range of tools to do that. So it might be like, taking a skin scrape. We're looking for burrowing mites.
Maybe we're taking a acetates looking for surface mites and things we might be doing a tricho gramme. So looking for things that live on hair, so that can be some of the Fermi. That can be, some of the lice.
It can also be looking for other things, too. So if we're worried about barbering, you know, we're gonna see we can use a tricho gramme to see whether we can see broken ends of the hair or whether these are simply just areas of true alopecia, true hair loss. So there's a lot of different techniques there.
We're using them to hopefully in a targeted fashion where we were looking. We suspect of this sort of disease. This is what we're going to be looking for in the right place.
So, for example, no point looking for burring light with a skin acetate psychology. Also very under used, technique in skin, which is a shame, because it's often very freely accessible. So I told you Great.
It's cheap. It's quick. It provides a lot of information.
For example, this, prep was taken from, separative lesion on a small mammal. Anaesthesia. A raft of mast cells.
So we're looking at probably some kind of allergic, inflammatory disorder. So and we can do the cytology on impression Smears start on the slide. We can take acetates and put them onto a slide.
We can even do FNAs and lumps and things. And so we've got massive advantages now. Disadvantages.
Obviously you you're getting this tiny amount of cells we might be affected for surface impressions of being contaminants involved and secondary problems may may swamp the original pathology and certainly with lumps, things we may not get good exfoliation cells in. They get very poor results there. But it's a really good, easy first step for many, many of the presenting problems we have so can't stress enough.
It's a very, very valuable technique. And of course, we have biopsy. Now, this is potentially, expensive It's obviously invasive most of the time, if not every time you're gonna need to be anaesthetizing animal and doing some invasive taking, taking things away, we may have a wound to manage, which is not always easy with the creature that do like to chew occasionally, especially if they're ready.
You know, those sutures don't really stand a chance there, so But we can use all the techniques we use in dogs and cats. We can, we can, we can take, probably It's a bit smaller, but we can take it quite easy. And when do we do that?
Well, my rules that have always been either. I'll look for biopsy either. I've got saying just pla looks strange.
This is an example here. This is Al Areta and a guinea pig. You know, that's not saying you're gonna diagnosed just on by eye.
And it's not gonna re show any answer. And you have to wait apart from that biopsy, or if I'm getting no response to what appears to be a logical approach and what's going on there and get some idea about what should I be heading in a different direction? So maybe the case aren't going quite so well in an ideal world.
Of course, we'd be doing all this as part of a co ordinated, investigation and work up. We do whatever else. But what we do know in this world is it's not ideal.
So very often we're dealing with budgets. We're dealing with animals. That may not be priority in terms of affordability for that owner or that family.
And they may simply not be able to go on with everything. So we're having to deal with this in a, if you like contextualised care situation. So many can be genuine object these things too.
So what do we do? Well, actually, there's an awful lot of cheap stuff here which been, you know, which have been, discussing. And, you know, we can concentrate on those.
So if nothing else, look at the signs. You know, what are those clinical signs? And that's really be important.
And that's what we get from history. We can get from examination staff and we can form a lot of differentials based on that history on the signal on the examination, and that's gonna give us a good start. And probably by using, like, pattern recognition and stuff, we're gonna be able to get a lot of diagnoses and a lot of presumptive treatments that do actually work.
Without doing anything too major, we can. Then if we want to perform confirmatory tests again, we can discuss there. We can do therapeutic trials and things, but I would always stress Don't forget, there may well be underlying factors underlying causes, and we do need to address those as part of the whole picture.
It's no good looking one aspect treating that without doing that, because it's gonna lead to treatment failure, and it can lead to actually probably increased cost in the long run. So one thing by mind, look See the animal live in groups. Don't think it problems with group structure.
So it was African dormouse. We can see. So it's beautifully tutor backend area.
This is actually a case of self barbering. But it's caused by the stresses of being bottom dormouse in that group, and we wanna know more about how those group dynamics work. So hopefully people can tell us about that too.
But sometimes It's really nice to get things like videos of a husband who set up pictures of a husband who set up, and we can start predicting that we can. Also, if you've got video, how the animals are interacting, we can hopefully see some of these visual cues. That might be, if you like non physical aggression or stressing what we see in old rats like bottom right here we've got This is little mange lesions.
And you know, typically we often see, a rat presented from a group. It's an old animal that has a mix on his recently and it's got mange. So how's that happening?
That's because same reason we get a lot of, psychopaths problems in old people's homes is that it's an immune link thing, and this rat is having an immune link problem that could well be because it's bottom apart and it's having problems in that group. So group structure is really, really, really important. Age comes with problems, too.
So older hamsters we see AAA skin lesion, especially with lumpy. Do you know we can really thicken skin. We can really start thinking about tumours and, suddenly, cut potential lymphoma.
It's really, really common in these guys. So the trouble with skin, though, is it sounds very simple. We can look at pattern of seal, and it should be much easier than most other diseases.
We can actually see the organ. We can look at the lesions, and that's just great. But they actually only have very limited ways.
They respond, so we may see bald animals. We may see itchy animals. You see scabby crusty animals may have scur.
They may have lumps, and sometimes they have some of each. It is quite a variety there, too, so they do have a nasty habit of largely looking the same, which can be very difficult. So let's go through a few of these and see if we can help with that, too.
Now we can use other signs to go along with it so we can see a bald animal, and it's showing some hormonal signs, too. So the guinea pigs, which may have hair loss that may have, crusting of nipples and things like, too, but maybe showing some, regular periods of of of aggression, of rumble strutting, and aggression to be other guinea pigs, and we might be really thinking a lot about hormone producing cysts. That might be doing it.
If we're not seeing the hormonal signs, then we're still becoming suspicious in so many signs of having, of having, cyst like problems because we may have cirrhosis stretch. We have pain related barbering, so we can very simply like a guinea pig in the middle. He a ginger pig with the halos.
Ma, we do a trio gramme there we may see barbered ends of hair, and that can be a good point so that we might have some pain with palpate the cysts. We can at least treat those and see how it goes. So many things we show a scarf, and we know probably our main differential in these cases, especially with younger animals, especially, we've just, coming together in his possession is going to be things like lice.
And we do see, we do see his cases. And again, that simple hair tricho gramme thing. Some of us we'll physically see the knits.
We'll physically see the lice walking about, but some we'll pick them up on on on an acetate or a tricho gramme, and we can see the, mite or see the lice. Sorry. And we can see the, we can see the, the egg cases.
And this is one of the situation where maybe, a therapeutic trial that would say like, averin won't work too well because they tend to be chewing. And that goes some of mites as well. So it's a decodes, fite from guinea pigs.
And, again, you're gonna pick it up on tram. It doesn't tend to penetrate the skin and feed. So again, very unlikely to respond to an A next trial.
So again, we just wanna be aware of some of these problems we're gonna need to be actually doing some work for. It's like the usual situation. I see quite a few guinea pigs and we get like, mid line scuff line along the nose.
Actually had biopsy cup and still got no answers from it. So it doesn't always get an answer. Whatever you're doing and always warn people about this before you do a test.
But I actually worked on the end of it. Probably was some genetic group. We actually did have that as a as a normal appearance for them with this scurfy midline, the one I was in rats and we were talking about the guinea pig ones being chewing lice.
You can tell that by the head shape, maybe maybe around the head and chewing mouth parts. Is that, but not all lice are Some are sucking ice in particular rats. They will have sucking lice.
And, you can see here is this We picked up one here on on on a, on acetate, and you can see the blood inside. So again, these are ones which I probably would respond to an averin trial. So bear in mind, we need to know roughly what we're dealing with before we try these, these therapeutic trials and, and then can really interpret what's going on.
One of the things we'll see, too, is it's an important one to look out for Is ring Web? This is particularly common in things like guinea pigs, and chinchillas. Very, very unusual in things like rabbits.
But they will. They will present with localised generalised, And it's really important to pick up because this is zoonotic, and very often with, a lot of these pets, they are handled a lot by Children. Children don't have good immune systems.
And so it's really common to get these the this sort of problem, on the Children as well. So a good time to start asking. Are there any lesions on on the kids or anybody like that, too?
And often you can actually, tally the, problem the animal to where they're being held on the child, where the lesions occur. So you may see genes more localised. More, More commonly, it's localised.
With typical crusting lesions again. To a large extent, we can diagnose that by eye. But very simply, we can take a piece of that crust.
We can dissolve it. We can, we can do some cytology and find these branching sort of, hyphae. We can even do an in house, ringworm a little bit slower, because if we've got oo notis, we really do want to, we really do want to be on top of it.
And treating it and and and not having it transmitting to be owners as quickly as possible. We have generalised forms. We do want to really be considering underlying causes because we're gonna have to have some immune suppression for this to go generalised.
And that means we've got to really address what what the other issues are, too. In terms of therapy. Again, we need to be looking at whether we want low class treatment or generalised treatment based on where it is.
They get for a lot of the antifungals. They can have liver related issues. So again, we need to be looking at that, talking to people about what the potential problems are and working at AAA treatment of best benefit to the animal.
And one thing we do need to be mentioning, which I think sometimes we move out a little bit. We're with guinea pigs, especially. Is that thing a spore survival?
Ringham spores can last a really, really long time, and you have to be honest with the audience and say, if you've got like wooden material, the chance of maybe clearing the spores from that wood is almost zero. So we may have to consider getting getting rid of that after the treatment period and replacing replacing all the wooden, structures there. Otherwise, the anticipating regime would quite harsh to clear this, but your plasticized stuff can be, can be can be cleaned, But otherwise, if you don't, you've potentially got the ability to infect other animals or people for quite some time afterwards.
We need to look at that fundamentally. We're looking at itchy stuff. Think, man.
Now, very rarely are we actually gonna have an animal present as being seen itching. It will happen occasionally, and some will even see them itching in the con consult room. And sometimes we catch to trigger an itch by by by rubbing something, or more likely, it's probably gonna show a pain reaction, when we touch them or some areas of skin.
But we're gonna see a lot of excoriations, inside to show. The animal has been itching secretly. And, so that might be a really good pointer.
And a lot of his case we can be dealing with mange, and psycho type Bury. Burrowing type mites are very, very common, particularly in young animals for obvious immun RR reasons particularly newly purchased, stress of moving may may really, really lower the immunity mixing animals and may be carriers either in the owner's home or through the pet trade. Mixing as they go along might easily be the root in for these.
But that's when we start to think about these man related problems. And we see those in in rats and mice, too. They can range anything from, you know, these very scabby erosive lesions of the head A rat.
to little, little Milly type, grains in the coat of rat, too. And some people get doing a really nice proper papules like the river textbook where skunk is shown in this picture on the bottom left. We'll seize everything, and it doesn't matter what spec small man we're dealing with.
Porcupine on the left. Here, kin at you on the right. But these are, you know, he crusting these These pic lesions surface chlor stuff is really thinking about mange quite a lot in these, when?
When we see that. And that is probably one of the big rule that is to to to to deal with diagnose. You can scrape and you'll find mites.
You may find eggs and bigger numbers. It is important to remember, just like in in dogs, that we may have very few mites causing a very intense reaction. So sometimes it's not possible to find them, So a negative finding does not necessarily rule this out.
And that may be complicated by the fact that we may have, owners who have pretreated, so it's very easy to get a vermin spot on down in pet shops. Owners. Some owners will have treated their pet with that beforehand, and we'll talk about why this may not have worked.
In a moment, that does have and make the clinician's life more difficult because, you see, it hasn't completely cleared the M. It may well have reduced their numbers to quite an extent, so we can't actually find them so easily, so it may make diagnosis much more tricky. So again, back to our histories, we wanna see what treatments they've given what empirical stuff's been done.
Because that's gonna give us some more idea about why things may not work. There's also with mange, often a welfare aspect. Some of these animals are intensely itchy.
And Guineas in particular, seem have big problems with that. This is the picture of a guinea pig. We had I had a spell when?
Probably a six month spell when I had the worst case of manging guinea ps I've ever seen in my whole career. And normally, much more marvellous. These were deep, thick crusts all over, and they're probably in places about a centimetre deep crust.
They were absolutely horrendous. And if it picked away, they would just reveal these big ulcerative lesions. In all these cases, we getting guinea pigs when they're itchy, go almost over the top, though they always, like, short out, some with the input going into their brain.
And so be very careful, especially in injecting irritant like averin. Is that there are some of them just just just just faint with with the overloading. So do warn, and as that can happen, and it's quite dramatic when it does, they recover very quickly.
But nevertheless, it is quite dramatic up to that stage. In these cases, all you had to do is touch them. And they were just fitting.
And, and having problems from that and really, you gotta look at the welfare of those animals and say, you know, how much treatment can you justify? I in in such bad cases and why they had such an extreme reaction with that a mite related problem that an immune related problem or what? Why we never really got to the bottom of.
But I was glad not to see too many more of them getting back to social grouping. I mentioned rats earlier on there, too. If you have a if you like a stable group, you know, introductions.
We have a man case in one or two animals. Actually, we need to be looking at that group And is there a problem there? Is there there needs to be lower animals who have been pushed out and have low immunity because of it.
We see hypersensitivity, and this is, these are cases where, in an it like a common rat and also in the Madagascan giant jumping rat on the left hand side here, where these were were confirmed major cases. This is, this was treated over connecting and didn't get better, or it did get better. And then it got much worse and what we have seen, and these were both biopsied, and what we found was hypersensitivity reactions.
And so a little bit like I suspect in dogs, we we see some hypersensitivity, to the mite. And this may result in a prolonged response after my clearance. So you may not see these animals C ti, until long time afterwards.
We do also have this itch scratch cycle. So if we have itchy scabs and, and open lesions, carrying itching because they themselves are itchy. We need to manage those secondary issues from that as well.
Another reason for prolonging the problems. And in both of these cases, we use a very tiny amount and very care amount of corticosteroid. I would honestly stress not to use corticosteroids routinely.
Certainly not in a major case without actually treating the man as well. Because we can lower the immunity. We're gonna make things much worse and much deeper if we do.
But in certain cases we have I've got, these hypersensitivities we might wanna use in limited fashion. So useful drugs called caos. But be very, very, very careful Using them may see other Hy sensitivities.
This is a rabbit. Sorry. Sorry.
Beg your pardons. A guinea pig. Can't remember my own pictures now.
But basically, this is a vocal lesion, but actually, our biopsy came up with a high sensitivity reaction to some. Like I suspect something's been applied to that area because it's very localised. But again, But they do exist up there.
We'll start picking up when we do some testing. It's actually interesting what you find. But these are all P derma cases.
And it may be more common actually. Thinking of I wouldn't say very common. But if you got open virulent lesions like these crusting lesions first guess of being mange is actually a very good place to start from.
And it'd be entirely appropriate to do so like an averin trial in these cases. But when they're not responding, this is where we're starting to investigate a bit more and again. What can we do with these?
Well, biopsy is great, but if we don't wanna run to that too. You know, we can pick up crusts we can do, impression smears from underneath the crust. Things too.
We can get a pretty good idea of it. Now. The thing with py Derma is we really probably should be dealing with a secondary problem, and we almost certainly are.
But in all these cases, we never actually identified one. So was this a primary PMA? The bacteria isolated were not that significant, so probably more likely as an underlying cause which is now long gone.
And that's important with some of these things, too. We are gonna find cause that disappeared, and we can't locate them. But fortunately, long term antibiotic, I'll take them again.
We're talking weeks of antibiotics in these cases, and sort of just general soothing treatments for the skin antibacterial washes. That kind of stuff did result in treatment very most difficult. One was the was the hedgehog.
Because obviously I face a hedgehog. It's very difficult to use any localised treatment whatsoever. Because you can't access.
So this poor chap did end up being anaesthetized about once or twice a week for several weeks just to clean up alongside long term antibiotic. Here's an example of where P edoema can be primary. And this is what's done in the rabbit, fur trade as being blue fur disease.
But this is pseudomonas infection. And one reason why sometimes you got these these issues, it may be worth, doing some Sunni culture activity and things like these cases, and really on appearance, we got this. We can see.
We've also got some infection there. It's a very unusual distribution for, for mange. Initial thought was, if we got hypersalivation linked to dental disease and we had no evidence of dental disease on examination or on radiography and bear in mind, you can't always rule out without radiography.
But we took a swab, and we grew pseudomonas. And this is the one that did do very, very well on with a couple of clippings, and localised treatment. And then with, then with long term antibiosis.
One thing to watch out for, we show a lot of scurfy lesions and things. This is scurf in rabbits. I do sometimes to get these just general scurf in over the ears, I think maybe Nutritional, maybe linked to exposure to sunlight.
But when we get this deep crusts and stuff here too, one of things I think we should all be very aware of, is sebaceous adenitis. And this is again not rare. Autoimmune, of course.
But this is my biopsy diagnoses. And this is one where if I back to his unusual appearance or certain appearances, when would I go for biopsy? So, if I do see that crusting particular scurf in particular a deep scurf.
But I might worry a bit about something like kella, which can present like that. But overall, I'd be thinking especially, it's not overtly, We haven't got owner lesions, and I can't find the mite's very easy on an acetate which usually Kyle can. Then I'd be reaching for the biopsy punch and have a look at that too.
Now, interesting disease. This autoimmune, might respond to corticosterone, but actually, cyclosporin is a better treatment for it. I would not recommend a therapeutic trial with either of those, but where it is really important, you do have to once you get this is really have to talk to you and do some diagnostic alongside is that some of these cases are linked to thymoma.
So if you do have that bila saying sedation aditus do x-ray that chest under sedation because it's gonna be a cranial part of the thorax. And if you don't have the animal sedated, the legs drawn forward, it's gonna be very hard to image that area. And you need to find out whether you've got the You've got the, thorax of a thymoma there thing, because prognosis is important is not all cases respond, and some owners will actually go go on a diagnosis and not go any further from there.
But certainly if you have got a thymoma that is really bad news. So you know, I It is a case of very careful discussion with the owners if we see that. So now the presentation.
That's the itchy mice mice, which we do see quite a lot of, Primo. Most common reason for having mice in the clinic. Most of these are mange.
The vast majority are mange cases. It for, you know, you can see the, the excavation. We see see, the mess of the poor mice is making himself and they are very itchy and you touch and they they do respond.
But we may see hypersensitivity. We may see PMA rarely, but the primary differential is not mainly school neoplasia. And they do get a lot of these, skin lymphomas so different to rats.
Rats. It's hypersensitivity is much more common if you've got a non mange. But it's the, neoplasia near plays in these guys.
So what's the appropriate test? Well, appropriate trial. Well, in these cases, I would normally start with a vermin trial.
I'll be, seeing how they respond to that, and they respond Brilliant, if not not having careful talk to about what the differentials are and because the appropriate test is to do a biopsy. But, you know, some owners will do that for ace, but some won't. So what do we do at that point?
They don't respond well to T to corticosteroids either. So even a corticosteroid trial is not really appropriate. So that stage you're looking at welfare and how Habermas actually is.
We do see skin lumps of various types. Again appearance signal. M might give us some clues as to what's common and what we might be seeing.
But we've got to bear in mind. Just like in dogs and cats is that appearance isn't everything. And so it can be quite hard sometimes to actually say whether it's a benign tumour or a malignant tumour, what we've actually got to do about it.
We do have differentials. We do see abscess. We do see cysts.
We do see granulomas reactions and occasional hematomas as well as just pure tumour. Benign. So So our approach.
Well, our approach is very, very like we would in a dog or a cat. You know, we would we discuss the balance of probabilities we would potentially do FNAs potentially do, removal. As as a sampling technique or removal of the treatment technique, and that can be very difficult.
So we've got, top, right. We've got a typical gerbil with a sync gland tumour, and we diagnose that by by eye, really, and then remove it and and and wait and see whether we've got any recurrence. We've got, like, a ferret on the bottom, left here with a cordo those again, very characteristic.
I mean, there and again. A simple 10 amputation will treat that as a benign problem. We can do it quite easily.
We've got a F on the bottom right here with a with a mass on on on the end of a toe that's unlikely to be removed except by a toe remover, which is a bit more of a major. And they do have variability in in whether these are benign or malignant. We're probably gonna do something because it's it's been traumatised eyes where you can't leave it alone.
But we have got to discuss quite carefully what we might be finding. And in those cases, I think we're very much more definitely pushing towards, doing histopathology and what we remove. We do see Pao dermatitis, and this is, an interesting situation, for why it might be happening to, because lots of different underlying causes so we might be looking at, subtract.
Now we know wire flooring can lead to depend the dermatitis range of species. It's quite unusual to see it these days, but you might have that, and it's worth checking. We might see it in rabbits.
it might be linked into, non ha or grass substrate. And it's quite good paper showing that maybe things that actually generally prevent it maybe linked to weight and big, heavy animals Not moving much, maybe more prone to, to, to pagers. Especially if you're not weight bearing right way on foot.
We may see poor hygiene, and we've got a very nasty old substrate with lots of urine being soaked up and retained. That might be a problem as well. Grooming may be an issue as well, too.
In guinea pigs, we might think about vitamin C deficiency, but overall, where we're probably be worried about underlying disease. And why is the animal not maybe sitting still too long and not moving around enough? Have we got polyuria like we might have in a rabbit, which can be linked into Pedder Metis?
We might have animals who just simply can't move well or have altered posture. That may be due to something very simple, like overgrown claws. That may also be, linked into spinal arthritis, especially in rabbits and guinea pigs, where they're simply hunched up and just have a abnormal posture and not moving much.
And that's probably one of our big things we worry about. So all those things need to be looked at and investigated. Before we can really go ahead with therapy because air therapy, we use antibiosis.
Topically. We use antibiosis systemically. We use NSAIDs, because it is gonna be quite painful.
Whatever happens, whatever the underlying cause, we may try some dressings. We may try to, make sure we've got a good padded, correct substrate so usually might use deep litter hay or something, whatever they are. And in some cases, we might even think about operating.
Now. Certainly we don't operate on any of these if we can help it, because, it's difficult surgery and can make things worse by altering the anatomy even more. But certainly if we haven't corrected those underlying causes, nothing is gonna work here.
And especially don't go as far as surgery without having really made sure that those could cause the underlying issues, if at all possible, have been identified. So moving on to B hamsters. Now again, a common presentation I mentioned earlier this can be linked into excessive male hormone for a long period of time.
And be perfectly OK, and I think that's one of the things to really bear in mind is that we want we've got some differentials here. We may see mic problems with both Demi cases and psychotic mange. P Derma are very rare, but possible.
Ringworm is possible. And we may see tumours, which may be skin tumours like lymphoma, or we may have adrenal tumour. And and hamsters certainly do get, cushion.
And we'll show the characteristic hair loss from that. So we want some clues to this too. We can we can do, blood or even saliva tests.
For cushions. I available for hamsters. Difficult to get enough saliva, by the way, and stimulation tests for those can be done, but it is a tricky, tricky one to do.
But we can do that. Ultrasound looking F for adrenal tumours. We we can do biopsies looking for whatever we can do.
Lots of sampling, and we can do an awful lot of work. But what clues can we actually get from looking at the animal. Well, obviously, signal and stuff's important.
You know, we can start seeing tumours go and play later on in life. Adrenal cases may see with a very thin skin, just like in in other species. We may well have a polyposis hamster.
So we had it made very well noticed that water's going down much quicker than it used to, as they're generally kept on their own. That's quite an easy one to monitor with ringworm and stuff we're gonna tend to see, crusting we're gonna tend to see some sort of scaled lesions like we would at other other places. I we may see some separative lesions, which, similar to other species.
Psychotic mange. We're gonna see excoriations. We're gonna see pruritis Dermotic mange.
We're not going to. So, you know, we're going to get different clues from different things so we can do lots of these things. We can do all sorts of testing for that, too, but we can do a lot by eye, but here's a big clue.
You know, if it is a non poetic case, if it is, an animal that's not showing real systemic signs of disease is what we actually going to achieve with doing all this and getting a diagnosis. And how much we gonna treat. Treating adrenal in a hamster is downright difficult to do it in a safe way.
That's not gonna cause a problem. Treating dematic coses is definitely possible. Easier now than it used to be, because we used to have to do regular bathing and stuff.
But it caused a lot of problems, though, right? And of course, some of these are gonna have a underlying problems, too. So if we have got generalised de cases, we know we have an immunosuppressive disease going on.
So it's a problem. So of of what we can offer, how much are we gonna help the hamster? How much time are we going to give that animal of good quality life?
And how much are we actually gonna help the owner to do this? So generally, if I have, an animal, per I'll look at those cause I wanna treat that cos I think that's maybe causing a welfare issue. If I have, P der and stuff, I might want to do something about those, too.
Otherwise, if it's non poetic. Actually, quite a well animal itself. Just bald.
I often leave those alone. I'll discuss the, issues with the owner. I'll offer a ringworm test because that's zoonotic.
And although it won't necessarily wear the hamster too much, it will certainly cause potentially cause problems to the owner. So I do want to make sure I'm not going to expose them to something. That may cause them problems, But I'll actually have a chat to them and say, Well, do you know how much we wanna do?
What are we gonna buy? What we gonna time? We gonna time.
Are we gonna give that animal? And some will elect for, elect for treatment and some will not. But I think that's really important with those things, too.
Is actually what benefit are we gonna give for the amount of investigation mentioned about barbering early on? And, you know both. These are with one guinea pig.
One rabbit. We're looking at, fur removal and stuff. How can we tell what?
It's gonna be? Well, back to our tricho gramme. We can, take, we We can take a trick around.
We can see the broken ends of hair. We can see what's going on there too, in the case of rabbit, which is almost certainly gonna be linked to a forced pregnancy. So hopefully our, history is going to reveal that if there's regular aggression signs or nesting signs, we only may have found a lot of fur inside the inside the, Steven Cartman cleaning out.
So we may have some other clues as well. From that which may really lead us into that diagnosis for the guinea pig here we can. It's very hard to seeing a picture, but actually, what we've got is very eventful.
hair loss. But actually, if you feel it, that's got pitting Edoema, we fill fluid building up. It's actually a sign of heart disease, in this guinea pig.
So you know, we can feel that too. If we took a trick around, we would almost certainly find we've not got any broken ends. We might find some rubbed off hair, but we're not gonna chewed hair because this is simply being, lost by dint of the skin being full of fluid and also being dragged along the floor, but we can actually do that on on pure examination.
Now we talk about trials, things earlier on. A lot of these the the the these diseases may have, husband issues. And we may elect to do, like, husband and child.
See what happens with them. So that might be something like RT rats. We we might try, altering the group structure.
We might move them around so might split off the lower rat with a friend and have two stra two groups set up there and see if that improves. Everything may try changing substrates, and we are generally concerned about contact allergies or, more likely, contact irritation. The problem with these are they're actually quite slow.
And it's very hard to evaluate success, particularly in most cases, you're gonna have to treat some of secondary issues. So if we do have, let's say content irritation, we do have, maybe a parader. Or we may have, irritation stuff.
We're gonna have to treat that we can do something for the animal's welfare in the short term, and it's very hard to actually then evaluate what came from a tree and what came from that husband to try and what we did. But it doesn't mean we don't wanna try and and look at those and try and try and improve everything at the same time. Drug trials, though, are much more commonly conducted and often have a lot of relevance, especially with these skin cases.
The whole thing with all swims is give it some Oxin and see what happens. Bear in mind that I have mentioned Pio Dema, but actually they're not. It should be secondary.
It's not the most common thing in the world, so very rarely it's appropriate just to see the animal and give it some luxin as a try and see what happens. The odds are very, very likely it won't actually do anything, but we do do averin trials ivermectin, whatever else. So we do averin trials, and especially if they're pari, especially with suspecting Barros.
And actually, in some cases I mentioned, especially with being some pretreat, or in some cases, we maybe some hypersensitivity link is this may be better than actually doing testing, because if you don't find mites, you you can't rule it out. If you are gonna do it, though. Do it properly, and it's worth checking the formulas for the proper dose.
They're not. All are standard 200 mcg per kilogramme. Some haven't required much higher dosing, especially things like hedgehogs and stuff.
So do check those dose rates and make sure you are giving at that appropriate dose rate also important to weigh them and measure that dose appropriately. It is possible to overdose the this drug, there can be issues from very, very high doses. But also again, make sure we're not underdosing so that trial has every chance of success.
Now, what about using, spot on products again? Typically, this is gotta pick it from pet shop and stuff, and it's much easier. Nice paper here.
From the 19 nineties, in the vet record, of using this in rabbits and guinea pigs. And what this one showed was that, if you're gonna use spot on, you do need to double the dose. But by availability is much worse.
So Vapo used to compare injectable versus oral versus, spot on and actually really found that you need to double dose that that spot on. Have a read about. But certainly if you go and do a trial and you get your spot on, make sure you do a higher dosage that way.
And make sure that's done. Other AINS are available. So Camin has been used, and they all seem to be pretty much pretty effective in these.
I tend to use injectable, reasons being mainly that I know that, it's in the animal. I haven't got an issue with regard to, day rate, and, by availability from spot ons and stuff, the special spot ons may not always be applied correctly. So I'm much more control of that, too.
And I'm a bit of a control freak. So no worries about compliance either. So I know it was downtime too.
I would typically do this on day one, day eight, and then two weeks after day two at 22 really trying to break up the life cycle, because again, bear in mind, these don't treat the eggs. They're gonna treat the actual, feeding mite. So you want to be able to to, to to hit, hit those stages these trials are some fail, some of it because it's not a mite which is actually a positive result.
That's not a failure. But, sometimes because, we're not really hitting that life cycle correctly. We're talking about dose rate being inappropriate.
There are lots of reasons, and actually, the life cycle is probably one of those big, fundamental things. And that's because not only will you sort of have, like, lice and things which don't feed on the, tissue, so the AVERIN has gotta go through the skin into the surface debris before they'll ingest it, and it'll be killed, and it will be killed eventually. But it's gonna take a long time, and it will appear like a failure in some of them.
It's because they've got lots of environmental stages. So fur mites and stuff, a lot of those mites are actually in the environment. K tel is a good example.
They wander about quite a bit. Anything with long legacy is gonna is gonna be out in that environment and therefore not so responsive to the animal only treatment. And so we're also getting on re re re reinfecting.
So it's much more difficult to do Talking about zoonosis at the moment, too. And in some cases, we are using a medicines. We don't think we're gonna use additional doses to really clear them through the environment.
Or we may have to do full environmental sprays and treatment. Here's an example of this. This is Karina, from a hedgehog.
I was mentioned notes down to being listening to the owner mite are really small, and you have lots of people come in saying I've seen mites on my animal. There are all kinds of stuff from external, environmental mite, or to fleas or lice or, something that just isn't a parasite at all. And this was one of those cases where the, lady came in having treated with, a vermin from the pet shop and said she kept seeing them naturally enough.
You don't ever see these in the consulting room because the animal's disturbed. The mites are disturbed or like that, too. But you do see, like OK, fine.
Not sure what they are. Whatever else they One technique, I've always got done with these, which I think really works well and work beautifully in this case is to get the owner to take some acetates at home. It's a very simple technique if you need to demonstrate it, but they can then pick up their parasite, on the acetate at home.
They can pop out an envelope very easily and send it to you. And sure enough, I got an envelope of acetate full of these guys. It's Karina.
It's a mo very mobile mite. And it responds not to aver but to, topical. Antiparasitic, in this case, make me use fipronil.
So an an an environmental spray. So it is important to listen to them important to unsell the game there, too. But give people the tools to pick things up there and in a range of species.
Incredible. What different, parasites have had sent to me in the post. Now, the other thing, too.
If you've got a group I mentioned about rats and things is you know, we've got one or two effects in a group. How many you treat? The simple answer is all of them now.
Very rarely will we be brought the whole group on the first consult. So typically in those ones, I'll probably do the first amain injection as a trial and then say, Look, if it's you can see if it's getting better or not. If it's not getting better to bring the same A back next week, we we'll have to move on.
If it is getting better, even it's only a slight improvement. Bring them all because then we at least do two in two injections in the others. So we tend to do group treatment.
So basically, this is gonna be a group problem. Treat it as a group. So I got no response again.
Back to thing about review. Do all parasites respond? No, they don't.
So it could be one of those. You can have a look at those two if it is genuinely like these guinea pigs with the massive problems and the massive pruritus. We talk about welfare and we have a discussion about that too.
We also need to ask is it truly parasitic? You know, guinea pigs, We were ringing with that kind of stuff. Is it truly parasitic, or do we have underlying disease and factors that are really driving this onward and meaning it can't actually get better.
So this is time to really sit and discuss the issues again about how far they wanna do, go what they want to do. What investigation we do and really go into that in depth to an underlying disease. Again, welfare is key.
So back to our, bald hamsters. Maybe. We've got, Deos and A and a tumour inside somewhere.
What's that doing? How well are they if we have adrenal disease? How much is that really affecting them?
Is the treatment more dangerous than the actual? actual, than the actual disease. What are we actually gonna do?
What's the prognosis for that too? We may see some of this poor rabbit here with with the, massive halo around back in. It's a very shiny skin.
Real marker here of urine scolding. We can see the and muscle was on her legs. Actually, we couldn't even bend his legs out.
We could have been some, fibros of her joints, too. And this and we're suffering from extensive spinal arthritis and arthritis back in there, and this is urine, schooling and stuff. So we're really looking at, you know, physical disease, physical problem.
And if we can't achieve a better quality of life at poor rabbit, what are we actually doing for it? And the skin disease is just the tip of the iceberg. Really?
Or that may be making it feel worse. And we're looking at I mean, especially looking at physical problems, Looking at what's going on that's causing these problems. We've got to get to group stage.
Brief digression to fleas. We do see those, not commonly, probably skunk, something I might see them most commonly in, of of those, probably because most people have them free living around the house like they do with their cats and their dogs so together. And they get caught up in that, too.
Very occasion rabbits both as a rabbit flea, and also as the, as a cat flea on them as well. And we may see in the house rabbits caught up with those. It's a difficult one to treat because, we've gotta be careful with these with the skunks, probably to some extent, much easier.
Most of the dog and cats have seemed to work OK, and and some of the manufacturers do have some data for that. And there are some forms out there which will have some data as well, which are quite useful. And if in doubt, I've used fril quite successfully with them a little bit.
Careful on that with with some of the households where fril may not work in the other species, but we can we can we can adapt with the rabbits. It's very difficult because obviously fipronil is contra indicating rabbits. And I would honestly stress having had a rabbit years ago.
Died footprint, auto toxicity. I would never use it again. And I'd be very careful Re, telling me do that.
I would not do that. So we do have a licenced product. We have, advantage licence in in the UK for this.
And we can use that now. It's only licenced for a week, so it's in terms of prophylactic therapy. Probably not very appropriate to do that.
But if you have got a flea, problem is you do have a tool to use, and these animals should be involved in overall flea control as part of a flea control strategy within the household. Otherwise, unless they're going out of public areas and potentially picking up fleas or going different people's houses and picking up fleas, generally, controlling the fleas and the dogs and cats is gonna be a prophylactic control you need for the small mammals as well. But that's gonna depend on the lifestyle.
And it is really a case of, you have got a flea issue of really going into where these animals go, what they be, what's being done with them and what is the most appropriate way of controlling that. But take a message from that one is look at the individual situation. Control appropriate way.
But definitely do not use F print in rabbits. Full stop. Don't use it.
Another issue we had around, my overworld is little chalk. So we see a lot of harvest mites in late summer and autumn. And I must have been until about 510 years ago I'd never seen harvesters on on rabbits.
And then suddenly we started seeing them. Whether change of a mites behaviour change where people were keeping rabbits. I do not know if somebody had looked for them.
But we did see them. We started seeing reactions, usually eyes and ears, and again really difficult because standard treatment in, In, In, In dogs and cats who has been fitly topically. We can't do that in the rabbits, so we had to use averin.
Averin is very effective, but only if we actually on and feeding. We're dealing with a reactive situation because the clinical signs come from reaction to the, to the saliva. So letting a fee to get the drug is actually a way of getting the clinical signs.
So in those cases, we actually saying, Look, we recommend getting your rabbit off the grass. That really hurts. For harvest mite season.
So it can be quite an extended period sometimes. But that was the only way we found to control that. And the same too.
With ticks, or or rabbits as well that, you know, we had only limited treatment of options, So, you know, we can physically remove. We can use averin, but we can't actually, use prophylaxis to keep them off. So therefore, we were, tending to, tending to move them off there.
Slightly change there, too. We do have Elena drugs available, which seem to be, we've been testing rabbits in certain situations and seem to be OK. We may May May may consider those.
So I mentioned about zoonosis. There are quite a few. So guinea pig ls tend to be zoonotic.
Kate is, Ringworm is, if we are suspecting these, we do need to ask the owner about they have these skinny on them. Always best. They don't show us, particularly we're not doctors, and they don't need to see, But if they do have things they're worried about, too is refer them to to, to a GP.
I would always stress, too. If you're referring people to GPS always make the offer that the GP can talk to you. They Sadly, it's quite a lack of knowledge.
Sometimes in the different small mammals who noses amongst, general practitioners. So we can actually help them If they want to give us a ring. We can We can actually say OK, fine.
This way. I suspect this is what you might be seeing. Is this what it is?
Type of thing and discuss it with them, and most of them are really open to talking. And it's really, really, really interesting. So small skins cases are approachable and they're approachable with, without necessarily doing everything.
You've got to have a good knowledge, though, of the species of the differentials available, of underlying issues, and the prognosis. And then you can give a really good, realistic, pragmatic approach to the owners. Thank you for listening.
