Oh, the joy of poop!
The allusive Golden Poop
For some reason bunny owners want their rabbits to produce golden poops. Apparently it’s the best kind of poop.
Golden poops are produced when the rabbit is mostly eating dry foods – hay and/or pellets. It is forcing the rabbit’s digestive system to get all the required nutrients from the dry food. Unfortunately, there is no way that can be healthy for rabbits in the long term. They need leafy green foods. They need fresh grass, some lettuce and herbs. They need vitamins and minerals that come from fresh foods. And those foods give a black colour to the poops.
Rabbits on a wholesome diet of mixed foods will produce some golden poops, but not a whole litter box of them.
The Normal Poop
Normal poops are dark browny-black with specks of hay in it. They should be round in shape.
The Squished Poop
These poops are produced when there is a digestive upset that can lead to GI stasis if you aren’t careful. It can also mean that the rabbit has swallowed hair and has pooped some out.
The Moulting Poops
Squished poops connected together in a chain means that your rabbit is consuming hair through grooming itself or another rabbit, and it is traveling through the digestive system. This can be a problem because rabbits can’t pass hairballs like cats, and they can cause blockages in their gut. Make sure you brush your rabbit to remove the loose hair.
The Black Poops
Black poops are OK if they are slightly shiny with lots of hay pieces in them. If they are hard and glossy, there is a GI tract issue and this can mean there is a blockage.
The Stasis Poops
Stasis poops are tiny, black and hard. In the image, the golden poop is “normal size”, while the other smaller poop is a “stasis poop”.
They are created because the gut is slowing down and not digesting food as much as it should be. It is usually caused by an imbalance in gut bacteria and should be watched carefully as it is a warning that it can turn into gut stasis.
Stasis poops can also happen after the desexing operation, because the gut stops digesting during the operation and needs to be forced to start again after the operation.
The Calcium Poops
Sometimes calcium is passed on poops. This is normal when it happens infrequently and not on many poops. If it happens often and on a lot of poops you may have to consider changing the rabbit’s diet because it is unbalanced.
The Sloppy Poops
If your bunny ate something it shouldn’t or has an imbalance in gut bacteria that helps digest food and make it hard balls the rabbit may pass sloppy poops.
Sloppy poops are like normal poops that are soft and sausage like.
This is not a good thing, but it’s not life threatening unless it turns into diarrhoea. Make sure that the rabbit only eats dry foods for a few days and it should clear up.
Diarrhoea
Diarrhoea is deadly. This is when the poops are liquidy and have nothing solid about them. The rabbit needs to go to the vet immediately.
How many poops?
Rabbits should poop a lot. Each sitting should produce between 30-50 poops, and as a total a bunny should pass over 300 poops in a 24 hour period.
The poops should be separate hard balls, on average they should be about 1cm in size (depending on the bunny’s breed – bigger bunnies will make bigger poops).
Caecotrophs
Some people call these the “special night poops”, which is true but a bit gross. Caecotrophs are not poops, as such. Rabbits are “hind-gut fermenters” which means they have to digest some foods twice to get the required nutrients from the food. To do that, they produce a caecotroph, which they eat straight from their anus. This is then passed through the digestive tract again to get the nutrients out, and then passed as poop.
I have written a whole article on rabbit digestion, which discusses caecotrophs to greater detail.
If you see these glossy, soft, black clumps left behind, it means the rabbit has had too many nutrients in its diet and the ceacotrophs will cause a tummy upset if they are digested a second time.
Ceacotrophs are produced at night, hence the “night poop” name.