OK, thank you for listening to this, webinar on reproductive disease in rodents and rabbits, a common area of problems. And today we're going to be covering the the following sort of areas really. So a lot of guinea pig stuff, we do have a lot of repo disease.
We're looking at pymetra in lots of different, . Species and we're going to We're looking at rabbit tumours, rabbit force pregnancies, and rat rat mammary tumours too, but we're also gonna spend some time looking at the debate on surgical neutering and what the alternatives are and what, you know, what ethically we should be doing these days. So guinea pigs to start with, one of the most frequently asked questions when they can breed from, and the male's about 3 to 4 months and females 2 to 3 months.
They are truly precocious species. But the big question always comes up is, you know, what's the maximum age for that, that first litter? And you often see figures like, you know, 6 months, banded about, sometimes 12 months, and that if they don't breed in that first time because the, .
You are so big that the pelvis can't expand and let them out. They run into inevitable, dystopia problems. So is that actually true?
Well, the answer is yes and no. I've if you like, supervised many guinea pigs breeding or over age and see around about just over the year time, very few of those have ever required a caesarean. However, they are more likely to.
So I think that's important. So if you do have somebody with a 13 month old guinea pig, who, . Is pregnant, then it's really worth trying to narrow down roughly when, when, when she's due, getting the owners to observe really well, and if she starts getting in trouble, then dive in the caesarean then.
The trouble is very often the exact mating date isn't known. There's always some variability in gestation lengths, so you can run into problems with, well, with elective caesarean timing. So it's probably best to do it on observation, but be get the onus to really jump in quickly if there is an issue.
They're very much older than, you know, that can be much more likely to be an issue there, but most of them do seem to cope OK. If you're doing caesarean, big things always caesarean, be prepared, be quick. The difference with, guinea pigs compared to dogs and cats is you've really got to concentrate on the sow and not the baby.
Babies because they are so precocial, those young are really, really up for it when they come out normally. So instead of spending lots of time, rubbing and and and and getting them to breathe again, more usually you need a good strong box to keep them in, to stop them running around the, the, the operating room floor, which is very often the case. It is worthwhile making sure that they suck after, after, after the op, but primarily, you're looking after the sow and getting ready for what really is quite extensive surgery for her.
If there are problems, you can wean at 24 hours. As long as it has some colostrum on board, they are, we are technically weanable at age too. Probab best not, but, you know, sometimes you have to.
So the opera itself, again very similar to caesarean, any other species, same sort of, category you see there on the top left, the size of the pups, they are quite big. One other issue we see guinea pigs and that's another reason for caesarean might be pregnancy toxaemia. This is that link between diet and demand, this last part of, gestation, there's a huge demand, I would say, because of a bit of the size of the, the, the litter, and if you have an obese.
So on, on high calorie dense foods, then, you know, we, we, we have a potential problem. And many, many do die from this. So this diagnosis often made on history, got, you know, late gestation, so looking really ill is pretty much gonna be that.
You can do urinary blood so you can find ketones quite easily and then you you have narrowed it down quite a lot. To treat it, some milder case you'll pull through fluids and critical nutrition. The key is to get them eating, get, get more calories, get to stop them burning the fat, and getting the ketones out from there.
Otherwise you can, if they're near term, you can use corticosteroids, and try and induce, parttrition at that point. And of course cortic stories may have some advantage in in, in metabolic switching. Or, go into caesarean, but if you can, you do need to stabilise as much as possible for caesarean because they really are very, very unstable at this point.
So moving on to SIS again, and this is a really, really common issue, many of them do have cysts, we'll just exploring at the moment. There are different types with all sorts to look to and the signs and about what to do. So three main types of cysts found, follicular cysts are usually classed as being unusual.
I put question marks there because that's a bit more looked my brother wondered how many were genuine, were actually were follicular cysts after all. These secondary follicles that are oestrogen secreting, so you get signs related into persistent estrus, irregular estrus. Maybe in fertility we've got breeding ones, but actually mood alteration and and lots of the, in-season sow behaviours, were probably most evident in the pet situation.
And a lot of guinea pigs did report with us. Trouble is, we'll see a moment one of the signs of some of the other cyst is actually pain and distinguishing that type of mood with with with a painful mood is quite difficult. The rarest all of paravarian cysts, these sort of, vestiges of ducks, again that histopath is very hard to determine what these are.
But the very common ones are the cystic retio varii, these are mesonephric tubules from the hyal region of the ovary. No germ cells, they are supposed not to be hormone producing, and therefore you won't get those signs again, slight question mark over that. But certainly there's some special new theories on what reiovai actually do.
And this first reference, one in green, is really interesting. That basically the reti are quite well conserved across species, which is unusual for something that's supposed to be just a vestige. Of no great interest, a lot of textbooks and human medicine certainly seem to leave them out of, of, you know, altogether and then not even show them, but, they are there.
And what these guys showed was there is actually fluid flow from the reti into the ovary, and there's proposed that the reti actually control ovarian function, in some respect. What they exactly do is not known, but they do something. And that would fit probably a lot of what we're seeing with these guinea pigs and maybe fit into why they're so common and things that they.
Actually is a function to these, and, and we've got to find out what it is to why they happen. The second reference is actually because, you know, the signs of guinea pigs we're gonna explore a moment are quite nebulous. You know, what do we do people?
Well, inter in people, they're really rare. And this is a case report. You know, we get single case reports in human medicine, these things are very rare.
But a single case report, and, it's really interesting that, basically the person who suffered this was essentially suffering from abdominal pain, presumably cirrhosis or stretch is a really huge cyst. And, . Also from lack of of appetite and early so and that probably is down to space occupying effect of this, and I think that could be a factor in in some of our guinea pigs as well.
So, since when you see them with fluid fills, obviously, you may get single ones, you may get multiple, and they vary in size, a lot from about 4, millimeters.4 millimetre up to 7 centimetres diameter. They really are very wide ranging in size.
There is no relationship to the number of litters they've had, which is interesting because I propose that it might be linked to lack of breeding, but they are found to be. The age-related with respect to number and size of cysts. So in other words, the older the sow, the more cysts they like to have and the bigger they're likely to be.
And essentially, various studies show that over 18 months of age, somewhere between 76 and 88% of sows will have cysts, which is remarkably common. So common signs. We don't see 80% of all the sows kept in captivity, so therefore I think we probably safe to presume that a lot of those animals don't actually show any clinical signs of the cyst.
If we've got hormone ones, we may see infertility, we may see sexual aggression type of thing, that type of problem. Otherwise we may get hair loss, vaginal bleeding, anorexia, dysuria, but here's the problem. If you see a sow over 18 months of age, the odds are very heavily that she's gonna have a cyst.
They have other common diseases too, so we say dysuria, is that a sow who has cystitis and happens to have a cyst or is a cyst actually part of the disease process? And that's really hard to pick out. And sometimes you have to do some trial trial treatments, sometimes you do have to make sure you investigate fully and make sure something isn't being missed, especially in a painful condition.
With things like crusting and stuff, and again this is a hormone linked linked thing crusting nipples may be linked into hormone producing cyst. Alopecia, again, we always think about hormone, alopecia, we use non-poritic alopecias, . And you know this is not biosymmetrical, but again, most of these, these are not supposed to be hormonal, in terms of a human case that was reported wasn't either, and so this, a lot of these are actually barbering, so if you do a trichogram.
Then you often find it broken ends of hair and stuff, and those will I'll tell you where these actually bar breaks. They're probably it's pangulated they're chewing over the areas of of of of stretched er razor. To dysuria again, maybe coincidental as mentioned just now, maybe pain related.
To maybe space occupying pressing on bits and then we pressed on, and actually there may be some association with tumours as well, which can happen, . Anorexia again, pain related, space occupying. And if you look at this X-ray, you can see actually enough here we've got a stone as well, T sign of urine stasis, we've got, a very large cyst there pressing down on the gut, and again in this case here we can see an enormous great cyst, you know, and and how have the abdo abdomen can be really stretched out with with with with these cysts on board.
And you know, we're pressing the gut, the guts full of gas, and then that's just not functioning correctly. So how do we diagnose? Well, clinical signs make us pretty suspicious, signalment, to be honest.
So, we'd be pretty sure we're gonna find them. The art is actually deciding whether they're relevant or not. Palpation will often reveal these, and, you know, anything really relatively large, you can find them quite easily on abdominal palpation.
Radiography is probably one of the least sensitive ways to go about having shown some X-rays because, . You know, soft tissue, they don't always show unless they're very large indeed. But ultrasonography probably is if you wanted to confirm or to track a treatment, then, you know, ultrasography is probably the way to go because they're very, very easy to find.
And especially if you have got hair loss, you don't have to clip a window either. And you showed a nice, nice, a nice set of cysts here, and, you can measure them and so if you're treating medically, then you can follow them through with that. So in terms of therapy, there are no linked signs, then you know you can consider doing nothing.
You can monitor and see whether things get better or worse, whatever. You can give some analgesia if you think you have got some sal stretch and that's quite useful. And investigate and manage other signs, that's perfectly possible.
However, you may very often want to do, maybe do a trial treatment, see how how involved they are with what's going on. It may be, in which case, communicate that to the owner of what you're doing rather than looking like a treatment failure if it doesn't work. But, you know, you can try this.
This one, my usual first line is giving coral on at 1000 units a week times 3. It's quite a big volume, it is very painful, . So do, do warn people before that, but it does avoid surgery and it is pretty effective, even for the, cystic Reti, which again is interesting because they, the non-hormone, why, why are they responding.
And the other thing too, of course, they will recur, because we've not always got a handle on what the underlying causes are. So therefore, they're very likely going to recur, and need to warn about that too, and it can recur quite quickly in some cases. Desan implants have been mentioned.
Here's a study showing they don't work that well, and that's my experience in practise as well, they, they really don't work very well at all. And that's intriguing as to why, why these don't work, and the I mean H HCG does. If they're really big, and you've got a really painful guinea pig, you can drain them, and just pop a needle in via the skin and just, just drain them out there, and just to relieve that stretch.
If you do it under sedation, if you've got a picky wriggly pig, that's a good thing to do, avoid any problems. There are technically some risks, and you's doing cattle work we know if you popped cysts and things, they could be, they can be occasional occasional problems, but normally there isn't they they they normally drain down quite nice and even if a cyst pops, it is not too big a problem. But again, it's a short term thing, it's, it's very much just gonna relieve that, that pain relief that stretch.
So the alternative then is to spray them, and tech in this case, you can probably go away with just ovarectomy. So you'll need to remove the ovary so you can go ahead and do that. Obviously it's big surgery.
It can be difficult approach. So the guinea pig ovarian pedestal is not, not very, very stretchy. Now, the nice thing, a big cyst is actually very often it has stretched because of the weight.
To the cyst, so that it's become really a little bit easier, so I tended to go midline, but you know we have got some with very poor, stretcher, it's actually a lot of people would go bilateral flank approach, which is fine. So that too, and I would tend to reserve this for case that didn't respond to HCG or which kept recurring well we were having a real problem with it, and I'd go and do that. Certainly we've had other signs involved, I would only do it after I investigated those and make sure it wasn't concurrent disease.
Terms of approach, you know, obviously exposed the, the ovary, and then I use, I like using hemoclips a lot, so it's very easy just. To start placing it around the ovary and do a clip and cut approach. So place a clip, cut, cut through there, cut flip the next vessel and just go on round, from the, through fallopian tube and then round through the ovarian pedestal and around there.
And it's a little bit fiddly, but actually works very nicely and comes away very nice and cleanly. And it's really good advantage to do it when they have got cyst there because it's much easier to see the, boundaries of the ovary. So in terms of prophylaxis, it would seem very tempted to advise spaying, but.
And if it's, this is like saying guinea pigs get, they're gonna get cysts and it's a problem, then yeah, it probably is a good idea. If you feel that way, if it's down to the fact they're not gonna breed and that might be felt to be a problem as to what leads to a cyst, and that again can be a good idea. But actually, bear in mind that most of these animals are not going to suffer clinical issues due to it.
So at that stage, you know, is it actually justifiable to recommend spaying on that basis for a disease that most times has no signs? There are also other proposed causes, that includes things like obesity, yo diet probably has been debunked largely because, they're not present at very high levels and don't appear to be a big problem. And again, those vast majority of of systems are non-hormone producing.
But the most diet can be looked at, especially with regards to the obesity side events. And the other big thing is group structure and certainly lone sows, do tend to have much higher rates of cysts and considering a lot of sows are kept, whether they be castrated boar or or or certainly not in the group, which is a natural way of living, then that might be a big factor. And intriguingly this picture from one of my guinea pig herd, who died.
And one very small adrenal. Secondly, absolutely no sign of an varying cyst, and I've PMd a lot of mine that have died, and I rescue I would say, so they do get quite aged, and I've really never found a cyst in there, and I keep them as a large group. And so that probably is, is quite quite, quite important with that, what the group's actually doing.
So, moving on to Pymetra, now we see it's a range of different rodent species, and, . We'll see picking your hamsters and guinea pigs, chinchillas, lots of them. Typical signs, well, they usually come in just ill.
Some show weight loss, and if you're really lucky you will show a vaginal discharge as well. Then maybe you actually see liquid coming down from there, owners may even report it. Sometimes a hamster coming in as wet tail, so it's very important.
Distinguish which bits got the fluid coming from there, as soon as you see it's dry discharge around around the vulva there, and occasion we'll see them present as as as as a sudden death. Causes probably very similar to those in in bitches, and probably linked to be like hormone exposure and progesterone levels, . The, we'll mention a little bit about cystic endometrial hyperplasia mode, but that is one of the differentials here and that pre-yo stage like getting bitches.
It's certainly evident, especially in things like hamsters. So in terms of diagnosis, clinical signs, you know, if you've got an older rodent with a perent vaginal discharge, and if in doubt, just do a bit of cytology on that. Bear in mind hamsters, when they, in season, they'll often produce a creamy discharge from, from the vagina.
So actually cytology can be really useful, to distinguish the in-seasoned female hamster from the hamster with a pyometra. And it's quite a smelly discharge too, so don't, don't, don't use that as your guide is that pus. But cytology's really helpful with that too, so you've got permanent discharge then you know really you you've got you've got your diagnosis near enough.
You can for radiography, ultrasography can be really quite sensitive in probe. A radiography, to be honest, but again, bear in mind you're often on a budget with these guys, so you know, if you've got a clinical side, if you've got the cytology, and you know, you may want to spend more money on diagnostics where that's money that could be better spent on, on treatments. So differentials, CH but tumours as well.
And that's why sometimes it's worth, if you can feel a lump in there, it is really worth doing some ultrasound just to make sure you haven't got a tumour, you know what you're going into. Now the nice thing is, working away from rabbits, a lot of these tumours are benign, some are malignant, but again, you, it's still a surgical approach. So in terms of therapy, again, look at things like how real is it?
You know, because you don't want to be operating on a very, very ill animal if at all possible. How old, and again, what, what are you gonna achieve from this? So again, it's that thing where we've got a hamster with sort of age of about 18 months, 2 years.
Yes, if you give an extra month or two of life and good quality of life, that's fantastic in the overall lifespan of hamster. For the lifespan of a human owner, that isn't very long, and that doesn't always cheer people up. We spent a lot of money to get that far.
So again, good education is needed to, to understand that. Are there other things going on there too, you know. There's often morbidities with these guys, it's not the only problem going on there.
So how much therapy can you really justify has to be explored, has to be discussed, and in some cases, you know, very sick, very elderly animal, especially with a suspicion of a tumour, you know, some owners will want to opt for euthanasia at that stage, and you know, it's not, not, not, not a, not a problem. The animal's welfare is important, that's one way of preserving it. Terms of treatment, we are gonna go ahead.
Some will respond to antibiotic. I'd always give some NSAID as well, I can imagine we're feeling pretty shoddy. Antibiotic fluids, well, we, you know, well, we indicated and first maybe short term subcutaneous or may have to do some more in depth.
For those who are eating, I see some some some assist feeding it is a good idea. How to give these, well, again, typically I would start these very poorly, I'd actually admit for a day or two, try and get them, everything in systemically. Once you're feeling well enough, then we can get the owners to give oral, treatments from there.
And how long you give out for is quite variable, and it can be for a week or two. So bear in mind we've made it meet some extended courses, because it can be going for a long time, we can have a large body of pasta. And do warn this can recur because medical treatment's gonna stop it for now, but the hormone drivers will probably still be going on.
We do have new medical therapy, it's great, and this can be really useful where you don't want to operate. So Alipristone I've used, a dose of 10 MB per gig, subcutaneously. It's very painful, by the way, do warn people about that too.
And you give it on for 3 injections on days 12, and 8. Now the important thing is the first two really must be on the 24 hours apart. You've got a 2 hour window, so 22 to 26 hours apart.
It's no good giving one in the morning, the next in the evening, so you've got a 36 hour difference, it's gotta be 24 because you're looking at progesterone site blocking and you've got to have that continuous, block for that whole 2 days. So that's really important. But that is actually quite useful alongside supportive therapy like antibiotics, same fluid.
And again, in my experience, I don't know how much data. On this, but did seem to reduce recurrence as well, but of course they can technically can recur. You're gonna operate, obviously this is full ovarian hysterectomy, need a midline approach for that and you need to remove everything.
This is really not easy in a guinea pig, and in those cases, sometimes you're actually gonna do midline and bilateral flank, which is, is tricky and sunny. And and guinea pigs, there's often a de between the bladder and the cervix and and uterine body, and that can be really, really tricky to operate on and get everything out and get that treated. So I must admit with the guinea pigs I always tried the the alapristone first of all.
So again operating on these and trying to move this is that to I think this could be a guinea. So difficulties there I mentioned. Size them sometimes to be operate.
It it's actually possible surgery and it, it's actually not as difficult as it sounds, but size is a little bit, they are a little bit fiddling. But ovarian pedicals and uterine stumps and guinea pigs can be really difficult, maybe it's quite, quite a nasty op to do. Digressing the old bores, not just the one speaking.
These do have this thing with slack vent sort of syndrome, whereas the older vent slacking that gets build up of material. Love to you was a really good treatment for this. There isn't.
You just got to keep cleaning them out there, get owners to, to do this on a regular basis, especially in summer. Flash strike isn't a big problem with guinea pigs. Maggots don't seem like eating guinea pig, which is intriguing.
But they will strike the, ball of faeces, and they will start living in the vent and there might be some collateral damage there, but, and you don't want that. So, it is worth getting regular cleaning out, especially in summertime. Rat mammary tumours are, as we know, really, really common.
Most of these are fibroadenomas, about 85-90% of them, they're benign and recurrent, but they are life limiting, partly repeat surgeries, obviously you can be just take a be be so big, so, you know, it can be a real problem with them. And it's probably one of the big reasons why we used to put rats to sleep when they were older. They're prolactin driven, .
There is some evidence to show they can be prevented by us. Early neutering, but it has to be early neutering, so we're talking before 8 weeks old. We're talking about some amount of drugs can be used, with that too, but fundamentally all the drugs we're gonna mention are to be used after surgery.
So any, any lump there must be removed and then you're trying to prevent recurrence. What is really shown to be effective is diet, and the chance of developing these is reduced fivefold if you restrict feeding, to a level where're not caching food. So it is quite a significant effect.
So, that fits in because rats reproduce and young based on feed availability. So, therefore, Having those, you know, having too much food is, is, is a good reason for for for prolactin being high and driving these tumour productions. So essentially if you want to prevent this, one of the better ways of doing this may well be just to keep a good diet, avoid obesity, avoid problems with that too, and if you are treating these, then do dietary adjustment after the first surgery.
One drug that has been used is cabergoline because they link to prolactin levels. Actually, out of interest, there's always been, I was taught that this sort of linked to prolactin producing pituitary names. Some studies on this showing there's absolutely no link to the, to, to pituitary tumours.
And that is very, very interesting indeed because it shows the prolactin drive because there are high prolactin levels is linked into other causes, and that's why again I think go back to his diet again too. But anyway, after you've removed a tumour, then give Caeronia at 0.25 milligramme per rat every three days, and that's really very effective at stopping them coming back.
The limiting factor is Caergoline tastes disgusting. And rats are very bait site, and once you've tasted it once, you're very like to get in again. The tablets are one of the easiest ways to do it, but they really, I've struggled to even get one dose in some rats, never mind two.
There is a liquid preparation for dogs, and that some people find more success with that, especially if flavoured, but it's not an easy one to give, and, and if a rat becomes distressed knowing this is a, he's gonna have something foul, then, oh, many owners will, will, will not do this and you know, can't really blame them. Desray implants have been suggested, and there is no evidence showing effectiveness. A couple of studies showing absolutely no evidence for this too.
Must when I use them, I thought they might do, but they're gonna be some most difficult things is you're generally dealing with a slightly older rat. Many other things go on there. How many times have they they they're not recurring or simply something else happens before they would have recurred is really hard to say.
But certainly the evidence appears to be that Desirellen is either very variable. But not that effective. Sometimes you get one which is too large to remove or it may be bonded onto other tissues, particularly the ones very very caudal glands that you find very often where a decent.
To the vular vagina or into into the into the manus and that was just basically impossible to remove that. So those cases we're really doing palliative care on these until the rat is really struggling and and quality of life is gone. So we'll get owners to do quality of life scores, there's some really good websites show how to do that, which is really good, and the main problem is they start getting these excoriations and infections, so we may have to use periodic antibiotics or or emollient creams.
To try and look after the skin and stop this happening, but palliative care is possible. So we move on to another tumour. This is uterine carcinoma in rabbits.
This is the one I always get sad about because we still saw in many cases a year. It is highly preventable, and it actually is a good, we're talking about white neutrinomo, but actually, this is what I would honestly say, always spay female rabbits. It's common enough and it's nasty enough that you need to do this.
So everybody's aware of this one, I'm sure, and, you know, this is what, but I'm going through some reasons why you, why this is. The driver to spa. It is a malignant so it is that's important.
Typically we present hematuria. This is probably if you see hematuria in the entire dough, this is near as damn it pahenemonic. There's very few other causes of that, and it's true hematuria, not just a red urine, but genuine blood coming through there.
Many are thin, especially been going on for a while, may see secrettro problems or urine stasis, basically abdominal pain, . And we may see gut problems too where we've got abdominal pains too. And we may see just signs linked to metastasis occasion, so breathing signs, lameness occasionally.
Diagnosis, you can often palpate, if you've got hematuria, you're pretty suspicious anyway. We often palpate the tumours, otherwise ultrasound's really effective, occasionally radiography, but I'd probably go ultrasound for first of all, especially the conscious rabbit, and you can see, you can generally see the tumours and things. They they're pretty well developed normally.
By the time you get clinical signs. Mets, again depends where I would honestly say at this stage, I would X-ray. If I've got a, a, a, a tumour sign, I've got a palpator utinic cars, I would X-ray before I operated.
We can see mets all over the place. So whole body radiographs are in order. So top right is typical cannibal mets in the lungs.
Top left, here we got, a bony metastas. So this one presented actually as lameness, which is, which is quite intriguing. And.
And the other last picture is obviously clearly a postmortem, but here we've got metastasis throughout the liver, which is why it's a postmortem. Sorry, sorry, my lungs, beg your pardon, and the liver. So, you know, this is a serious problem, this is an absolute killer.
If you're lucky, you'll get assigned and you're operating time before it's metastasized, but they can metastasize locally and go around the body. They're a real problem. Best to avoid it, and that's why I'd always recommend that, those are spayed prophylactically.
False pregnancy, again we see commonly . signs typically, you might see nesting. Some people do that, but generally, you get a report there's a lot of fur in the bed when they clean out, and the, the doe be nesting doing that.
Someone's getting brought in with milk and enlarged mammary glands, sometimes it's really, really aggressive, and it's regular. So it's every couple of weeks, the end of your, the dough is, is, is aggressive, and that's a good sign of that. So how do you treat it?
Well. You can wait, it's gonna only last a few days, but, so you might not want to treat at all, especially if you plan to breed later on there. Kabagoline's effective, because again, like other species linked to prolactin.
So Kabagoline can be effective. But the big thing is probably we recommending spaying these do anyway. I wouldn't spay during, during the actual forces pregnancy, but maybe worth either just waiting to stay out of it and then spaying or, giving some Kabagole and then spaying.
So surgical nutrient, and traditionally, this is what vets do. It's done for birth control, has been done for us as an income stream into vetinary practise, and, previously, well, how many alternatives were there? You know, this is something which, you know, we, we wanted to keep in the right way and achieve nutrition was essential to do that.
So now, well, actually there are alternatives. We were waking up more to the fact that there are other things that didn't operate. And not everywhere actually Malays it, since Scandinavia has been a lot of countries that don't actually allow prophylactic surgical neutering.
So they've had to come up with other alternatives, and they're not knee-deep in, in, in, in, in these animals. So therefore, you know, we can say, well, actually, something will work. And we've got to also face that ethical question is if we have to surgically alter an animal to keep.
But in the right way, how suitable is that animal to be a pet in the first place? And that I think one of things we are very much more awake awake to now is actually being actually the ethics and the rights and wrongs of doing this. So Are there risks to to surgery?
Yes, there are. You know, we, we know that. And that's one of the big things.
So we, we're looking at preventing stuff, is we have to be very aware that the risk of what we're doing aren't exceeding the risks of what we're preventing. There are benefits, we've talked already about, the Adenocarcinoma dose, you know, some of these things have benefits. But we have to be aware of what those risks and benefits are, and that needs to inform our decisions.
And the big thing when we talk about this is we're not talking about the population. As veterinary surgeons certainly in the UK, our oath is to the animals committed to our care, so we are looking very much. At an individual basis about what we're, what we're trying to do for them.
One exception to as well as a dose, I'll say about anything retained testes, they are very, very likely to become tumorous, so we do, I do have with the retained testes. Now that can be difficult in some of these species because, the testes variable position anyway, and the stress they will pull them up. Picking the body, and some of them will descend much later, and depending on what species we're looking at, so it's always worth just making sure they really are generally undescended testes, but in this case I would always recommend castration.
So What a risk of the nutrient to the individual, well, anaesthesia to start with. We know that from aEPSA study, like I'm a little bit aged, but things don't appear to be picked up too much since then. But we know that there's a high risk to these.
So for rabbits, we're looking at 1 in 150, at that time we're basically dead within 48 hours of routine neuterine procedures, and that's a very high rate. Now hopefully things are going to improve, and that's one thing we can mitigate. We know we're gonna cause pain.
If we can control it better, but we're gonna get surgical complication from time to time about how good a surgery you are, sometimes things will go wrong. We are gonna get obesity, that is linked in small mammals as well to to post neutering, so. We'll talk about in a moment too.
We may have some bonding issues. Now we'll talk about bonding later on as well as being a benefit of neutering. But actually, if you've got, two animals and you split them for surgery, actually that can be very difficult get back together and you can actually ruin what was already there.
So quick, bear in mind here, if you are a nutriating one animal, do make sure the owner brings in both. You've got a pair of rabbits or a pair of guinea pigs, do bring them both in for the surgery for the day, and that's important. So again, we're also gonna be aware of will it prevent what we're trying to prevent, so a little bit like rats is, you know, if we do it too late, it's not gonna prevent mammary tumours, so that's is it.
And again, does that need preventing, so like the guinea pigs cyst is, does it need? Yeah, you know, it's that important. And again, we've got to bear in mind, we want to look at the animal's welfare, we want to, preserve those five freedoms, freedom to express normal behaviour.
A lot of what we're preventing is actually normal behaviour. We just don't want those male animals to be unpleasant male animals, in our company, but actually that's what they do, and that's their normal behaviour. So we've got to really see balance against what other things we are trying to benefit, like, you know, fear and distress in other animals there too.
If we didn't do something, well, we could potentially have lots of small a small mammals, and that could be a welfare issue in its own right, with overcrowding, failure to be able to move animals on and what to do with that. . We also do need to keep them together because we can't allow solitary living from our five freedoms.
We know that's gonna cause a big problem if we start keeping social animals in solitary confinement. So, you know, we have to do something. Alternatives, well, we talk about implants and stuff, pretty variable response we're talking about motor too.
We might look at social grouping, and how we can control through there, . Some of that can involve limited breeding, but that's gonna, something we probably want to try and avoid in instances, and in some species we may even look at things like vasectomy and stuff as being a route forward to allow a social structure but prevent breeding. So separate sex groups can be done for a lot of these animals, so I would probably avoid that, for rabbits, because they can be quite difficult with that.
And if males can send a female, they can still be very, very aggressive, so that can be difficult, and we know we want females to be neutered anyway. But for animals like guinea pigs, for the small rodents, actually they can do really well in single sex groups. You're gonna be pretty good on your sexing sometimes to prevent disaster, but actually they, they do very well indeed.
So. The problem can be that you need to keep more for that, it may need more resources, so if you're keeping, say, mice, for example, you're probably gonna need 2 fibs sort of two tanks set up, so you have a male one and a female one, so maybe more resource may be a problem, . So it can be difficult.
They're not necessarily always gonna prevent medical reasons for neuting. So rabbits again mentioned, you'd want to spay those because it's not preventing you're trying a carcinoma. So the question mark on with guinea pigs with cysts is that actually that group structure might prevent cysts without the need to need to, that might be quite good, but I'll put a mite on that too.
What if a mammary tumours in rats, again, there's some stuff up there. Maybe this is linked into feeding, feed availability, and group, group, keeping may make that easier because they do more exercise more, but that, that's a kind of question mark on that too. What about aggression problems?
Well, firstly, not all aggression is sexual. And certainly rabbits, I think this is, this could be a limiting factor for this too, but, some things like guinea pigs aren't very aggressive, so they do really well in that. Rats tend to do pretty well as well.
Now we'll see male rat colonies who do break down and do have problems, but again, a lot of these are, if you get people to film it, get a go of history about when the aggression's happening, where it's happening. May be linked into dominant individuals controlling certain areas rather than just being pure sexual aggression, and certainly it's, there's a, some good stuff showing that if you get one large individual in there, then they can become very, very controlling of those resources and very aggressive. So many of these, the, the, the aggression problems are actually probably more husbandry linked than purely sexually, and actually we do just rely only on neutering, we may be actually leading to more problems because we're we're ignoring the other factors.
So, hormonal treatments again, poorly understood. We've got issues with variable results and then some action, side effects less so now because we tend to rely more on miden and implants do have very few. But they're very variable.
So in rabbits and guinea pigs, hard to recommend, because the studies on so far show very variable effects, length of time, even effectiveness at all. But other species can be very good. So this link here is to a study done in rats, showing fantastic results, .
And 9 to 11 months, efficacy from a single implant in males and females, which is just great, and that may be a very viable or a very viable alternative to surgery. And of course if we want to think about things that we could want to do nuing to prevent pymetra, I'd slightly question how common it is and whether it needs from that. But also we've now got medical treatment for pyometra, so again it doesn't necessarily mean surgery even then.
But our benefits neutering, obviously birth control we have and that may, may prevent welfare problems in the future, . We may actually have reduced aggression and ease of bonding. Again, don't forget rabbits are more difficult to do this with than guinea pigs.
We're preventing diseases, so again, I, if I. I'm preventing tumours. I would want to remove everything, so I, I would recommend ovarian hysterectomy over ovarectomy because we do get other gonadal tumours apart from, uterine tumours apart from adenocarcinoma.
So if these do happen, we see gonadal tumours, other. other, other species, we see, canna tumours in males as well, less commonly, but they are there. Py obviously, but again, back to this thing, how common are they?
What's the risk? What are the other causes we might be preventing with as well? Mention bonding, there was an RWA study showing that castrated males are easier to bond and less aggressive, which which is great and really helpful.
And certainly the risk of castration are probably definitely better than the risk of ending up solitary, which we know is gonna cause them quite considerable welfare problems. What the study didn't look at though was keeping a spayed female with an entire male. So if we want to avoid surgery, if we can spayed the female, do we redo the male?
That, that's a potential thing. And it's also, it looked at neutering pre-bonding. It didn't look at a situation where you have two young rabbits, because most people will buy, buy them young, buy them together, often the same litter, and they're already bonded.
So what's happening in that one. So I think there are areas that do need to be looked at and see where there are differences. What is certainly important is this fundamentally relates into the rescue situation where people are buying, if you like, more adult animals or getting more adult animals, and they need them to be mixed in with maybe an existing one.
And in those cases, there really is a need to look at surgical nutrients as being very viable alternative not only from being able to rehome these animals, but also to prevent some of the problems while they're there in the first place. But you always have this problem too, you've got a rabbit, one of a rabbit pair dies, you know, what do you do and how do you mix them in that it can be really difficult. So anything that helps that can be important.
So, can we make things better, and reduce his risk and tilt that balance? Yes, we can. And if we improve our anaesthesia, if we improve our surgical techniques, improve our analgesia, work hard to reduce post-op problems, actually, a lot of reasons for avoiding surgery are actually reduced or, or, or taken away.
And that tilts the balance back towards that so we can actually mitigate some of the factors that may make surgery less desirable. . We can also target right one, so again, back to the thing about, do you, if you spay a female rabbit, do you need to castrate a male rabbit with them?
And timing's important that too is because, you know, in in like a dog, we know that if they stay male for too long, they'll remember being male, you don't remove all behaviours if you, if you need to later. Well, rabbits, they don't do that, so if you, castrate an older male rabbit, then they will still, be, they will still be effective at that point. So you do have the options to see how things go.
Mental obesity, and this is really, really important, so, you know, always discuss diet at the time of doing this, and monitor, postoperatively weight and condition. Now difficult some young ones will still be growing, but you do watch that body condition because obesity has a lot of consequences in these animals. There's a big, big problem, and actually the surgical nutrient can add to that too.
And what we don't want to be doing is doing something for a very good welfare reason but actually make it, make something worse. And It's also important to bear that in mind, why you're doing this. You're doing it to allow husbandry to be more extensive, really reduce other welfare problems, and this has to be discussed.
So if it's just a case of castrating a rabbit and putting that rabbit back into a hutch. Then you're actually improving nothing much in its life. And this is a great opportunity to really help these animals and really try and get the, the welfare of them, sorted out.
So actually the, the, the whole point of this is that if you want to be real positive about getting these animals in that age, for surgical nutrients, actually gives a good chance to put a lot of things right to go into our dietary prevention of obesity, to go into our or husbandry regimes and make sure we're actually using a a real positive driver. So there is a need for surgical nutrient in some species if not at all, but we can, we can reduce the risk, problems, side effects of this to make it a much safer alternative and therefore make it potentially more beneficial. But there are alternatives, and we should be considering those, so it's not a blanket advice to everything.
And we need to make this a pack, part of a package to improve the welfare, make it an opportunity to improve husbanding welfare. So if you like, we can really use that laboratory man to reduce, replace, refine. In terms of how we adopt this and really we'll be looking at individual, benefits, individual advices based on situation rather than blanket, policies.
Just a quick thing on the relatively on the same subject, but, looking at different areas, one of the great advantages we do have now is a lot more information coming through on all these spaces. And just to announce we have got a BSMA manual of, of guinea pigs coming up, which I had the honour of being, of being, linked to. So, yeah, do watch out for this one and I hope you enjoy it.
Thank you very much.
