Rickety Cricket Is Feeling A Lot Better!

My daughter got an English Angora rabbit about a week ago. She wanted to learn how to groom them and saw that he was for sale. She, actually, saw the ad where he was sold to the person who was looking to resell him. Turns out the buyer didn’t have the time to groom him. They can be a lot of work especially if you don’t know what you’re getting into. My daughter contacted the seller to say she wanted to learn the grooming aspect of the Angoras and if she couldn’t find a buyer and was willing to give her the rabbit then she would like to have him and would give him a good home. She didn’t hear anything and assumed someone had bought him but two weeks after initial contact she got a phone call to come get the rabbit. I guess potential buyers didn’t want to deal with the bunny as my daughter found out he was in a sad state. He had terrible mats which the owner had warned her of and was underweight. It was so bad that he had a tear in his skin where his fur pulled the skin off his body from the weight of the mat. I’m glad she got him though or I should say saved him!

She had help from a friend and got him cleaned up but he is still a work in progress. They named him Rickety Cricket (I know cute!) because he was a bit of a mess and from a character in Always Sunny. Here are a couple of photos after they cleaned him up.

This is how he looked before they started to work on cleaning him up.

She and her friend worked for hours to carefully remove the mats and she treated the tear with an antibacterial animal bandage product. It looks to be healing up nicely. They still need to remove a few smaller mats under his chin, trim his nails and she is treating him for wool mites. She let him rest a few days before the shots for mites because he had already been stressed. He did not like the shots and gave her the cold shoulder treatment but he will feel much better in the long run. Oh! He is also in super quarantine from the rest of the herd!

Here are some photos of the when they were working on him.

Here he is resting after a stressful day of clean-up.

Funny thing is she said “He doesn’t even look like a rabbit”, “Looks like an Ewok”. I have to agree with that! She also says that “he loves to chill on your lap”. She informed me that Angoras are some of the easiest rabbits to deal with in terms of handling because they require a lot of it for grooming and are fairly people oriented. She also said that everyone she’s seen who has them, basically, has a living lap pillow whenever they want. He is super affectionate and will even nudge you for attention. Here he is on her lap and he really didn’t want to get off either! ❤

Thank you @kona for dailypetphotography!
Thank you @juliank for animalphotography!