New research is making treatment better for one group of my patients, and that is rabbits. For a long time they were treated as poor relations of dogs and cats and their illnesses and injuries looked on as a minority interest.

Take the case of Tiptoes, a two-year-old black and white rabbit of uncertain breed I saw recently. She has always been well, but recently her owners noticed she was leaving her carrots. Her fluffy coat did not make it obvious but as I ran my hand along her back I could feel she was quite thin. I gently opened her mouth and looked at her incisors.

Instead of meeting so that each pair would grind away the edge of the tooth above or below and keep the edge sharp and the tooth short, the teeth had grown past each other. Nature's self-sharpening lawn mower had gone wrong.

It needed a general anaesthetic and some x-rays of her skull as well as a look at her back teeth with a special instrument to give the full picture. Tiptoe's skull had osteoporosis caused by a lack of calcium in her bones.

Pet rabbits always have less calcium than wild rabbits in their skulls, but this was worse still. The bone around her front teeth had become soft and spongy. This in turn meant that her front teeth were not held tightly enough in place to wear against each other.

Like many rabbits Tiptoes lives mainly on rabbit mix from the pet shop. This is a mixture of maize and other cereals with little green vitamin pellets. Nearly all the calcium in the food is in the vitamin pellets. Unfortunately Tiptoes has become increasingly fussy lately and only eats the parts she likes of the food. This does not include the vitamin pellets.

Her generous owner always tips away the food she has not finished and puts some fresh in so she never has to eat her vitamins and calcium. Before she woke up I filed the sharp edges off her back teeth and trimmed her front teeth with a dental drill. She now has a finely powdered calcium supplement mixed with all her food so she has no escape.

It will take time to replace the missing calcium, but without treatment she would probably have gone on to develop a tooth abscess which would be very serious.

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