What Are Cecotropes? A Rabbit Owner's Guide to Healthy Droppings

If you've spotted a squishy, smelly cluster of dark droppings in your rabbit's hutch and panicked that it's diarrhoea, take a breath. What you're most likely looking at is a cecotrope: a completely normal, and genuinely clever, part of how rabbits digest their food. Knowing the difference between a healthy cecotrope, a pile of uneaten ones, and true diarrhoea is one of the most useful things a rabbit owner can learn, because each points to something very different.

Rabbits make two kinds of poo

Unlike a dog or a cat, a healthy rabbit produces two distinct types of droppings, and they do very different jobs.

The first is the hard faecal pellet most people picture: round, dry, pale-brown, roughly the size of a pea, and made almost entirely of the indigestible fibre a rabbit can't get any more goodness from. These should be firm, plentiful and practically odourless, and you'll find dozens of them scattered around. A healthy rabbit passes hundreds of these a day.

The second is the cecotrope (spelled *caecotroph* in the UK, and sometimes called a caecal pellet or, misleadingly, a "night dropping"). This is the sticky, shiny one, and it's the star of this article.

What exactly is a cecotrope?

A cecotrope is a soft, dark, glistening dropping that comes out of the caecum, a large fermentation chamber in the rabbit's gut. Rather than appearing as separate pellets, cecotropes are usually stuck together in a small, glossy cluster. The Rabbit Welfare Association & Fund describes them well: soft, shiny and smelly, resembling "a bunch of grapes, small beads all joined together." Some owners think blackberry.

They are:

• Dark — greenish-brown to almost black
• Shiny, because they're coated in a thin layer of mucus
• Soft and sticky, squashing easily if trodden on
• Strong-smelling — a distinctly "ripe", fermented odour

That mucus coat matters. It protects the living bacteria and nutrients inside as the cecotrope travels back through the rabbit for a second pass.

Why a rabbit eats its own droppings (and why that's healthy)

Here's the part that surprises new owners. Rabbits are hindgut fermenters — they can't fully break down grass and hay in one go. So they do it twice.

After food is chewed and passes through the gut, the colon sorts it. Indigestible fibre is bundled up and expelled as those dry, round pellets. The finer, more nutritious material is diverted into the caecum, where a thriving population of gut bacteria ferments it for several hours. That fermented material is then passed out as a cecotrope — and the rabbit eats it straight from its bottom, usually without you ever seeing it happen. This behaviour is called cecotrophy (or caecotrophy).

It sounds unappealing, but it's essential. That second trip through the gut lets the rabbit absorb everything the first pass missed. Cecotropes are seriously nutrient-dense: laboratory analyses put them at roughly 28–30% crude protein, and they're loaded with B vitamins — including vitamin B12 that gut bacteria manufacture in huge quantities — plus amino acids and beneficial microbes. As the PDSA puts it, the cecotroph "then passes through the guts for a second time, enabling all remaining nutrients to be extracted."

A rabbit prevented from eating its cecotropes for a long stretch can actually become malnourished, even on a full bowl of food. This isn't a habit to discourage — it's how the whole system works.

Most rabbits produce and eat cecotropes in a fairly predictable rhythm, often overnight or in the early hours and again in a quieter part of the day. Because they hoover them up the instant they appear, a healthy, mobile rabbit on the right diet leaves almost none behind. If everything is working, you should rarely see a cecotrope at all.

The golden rule: you shouldn't be finding them

That's the single most useful takeaway. An occasional stray cecotrope is nothing to lose sleep over. But if you're regularly finding sticky clusters squashed into the bedding, smeared on the floor, or matted into the fur around your rabbit's bottom, something has changed — and it's worth investigating rather than ignoring.

Rabbits only stop eating their cecotropes when they either can't reach them, don't feel like eating them, or are making far too many. Each of those has causes you can do something about.

Why cecotropes get left behind

| Cause | What's going on | What you'll often notice | |---|---|---| | Too little fibre / too many pellets or treats | The commonest cause by far. A diet low in hay and high in carbohydrate makes the caecum overproduce soft, mushy cecotropes the rabbit can't or won't eat all of. | Pasty or extra-squishy cecotropes; a rabbit that fills up on muesli, pellets, fruit or carrot and ignores hay. | | Obesity | An overweight rabbit physically can't twist round to reach its bottom. | A heavy, round rabbit with cecotropes stuck to the fur. | | Dental disease | Overgrown or spurred teeth make eating painful, so the rabbit avoids the fiddly job of grooming cecotropes. | Dropping food, dribbling, weight loss, a wet chin. | | Arthritis or a spinal / mobility problem | An older or stiff rabbit can't bend far enough to reach round. | Older rabbit, reluctance to move, mucky bottom. | | Stress or a change in routine | Upset to the gut's delicate balance can alter cecotrope production. | Recent move, new pet, diet switch or illness. |

The headline cause is almost always diet. The most common trigger for soft, uneaten cecotropes is a menu that's too rich in carbohydrate and too poor in indigestible fibre — too many pellets, too much shop-bought treat, sugary fruit or the dreaded muesli mixes. Fix the fibre and, in many rabbits, the problem quietly resolves itself. Our rabbit and guinea pig diet basics page walks through getting the hay-to-pellet balance right.

The diet fix, in plain terms

• Hay or fresh grass should make up around 80% of the diet — unlimited, fresh, and available at all times. This is the single biggest lever you have.
• Cut the pellets right back. The RWAF suggests no more than about 15g of pellets per kilo of bodyweight per day, and if your rabbit is leaving cecotropes, reduce them further or pause them for a few days (with a vet's steer) so hunger drives more hay-eating.
• Ditch muesli-style mixes entirely — rabbits pick out the sugary bits and leave the fibre.
• Treat fruit and root veg like sweets: a thumbnail-sized piece, occasionally, not daily.
• Never make a sudden diet change. Introduce new food over a week or two to protect the gut bacteria.

Give any diet change a couple of weeks. If sticky cecotropes are still appearing, that points away from diet and towards a physical cause — teeth, weight or mobility — which needs a vet.

Cecotropes versus diarrhoea: the difference that matters

This is where the stakes rise, so it's worth being precise.

Uneaten cecotropes are still recognisable as droppings — soft, sticky, formed into a squishy cluster. They tell you something needs adjusting, usually the diet, and they're rarely an emergency in themselves (though a mucky bottom certainly needs cleaning — more on that below).

True diarrhoea is different: watery, shapeless, unformed liquid faeces, with no separate pellets. In adult rabbits it's uncommon, and in young rabbits it's a genuine emergency. A rabbit with real diarrhoea can deteriorate frighteningly fast. The PDSA is blunt about it: left untreated, diarrhoea "can become a serious and life-threatening problem," and you should book a vet appointment as soon as possible — same day.

If your rabbit has watery, liquid diarrhoea — especially a baby rabbit, or one that's also quiet, off its food, bloated or hunched — treat it as an emergency and phone your vet straight away. Don't wait to see how it goes.

Between those two sits intermittent soft cecotropes — cecotropes that come out pasty, pudding-like or smeared rather than as firm grape-clusters. This is not diarrhoea; it's usually the earliest sign that the diet is too rich, and it's your cue to tighten up the fibre before things progress.

Why a mucky bottom is more than cosmetic

Left-behind cecotropes don't just look unpleasant. They cake into the fur around the tail and genitals, the skin underneath becomes scalded and sore, and — critically in a British summer — the mess attracts flies.

Flies lay eggs in soiled fur, and within hours those eggs hatch into maggots that eat into the living flesh. This is flystrike (myiasis), and it is exactly as horrific as it sounds — it can kill a rabbit in a day. Any rabbit with a persistently dirty bottom is at real risk from roughly late spring through to autumn. So a rabbit leaving cecotropes needs two things at once: the underlying cause fixed, *and* its rear end checked and gently cleaned every single day until it's sorted.

To clean a soiled bottom, dampen the matted area with warm water and carefully tease the mess away — never dunk a whole rabbit in a bath, which is deeply stressful and can cause shock. If the fur is badly matted or the skin looks red or broken, let a vet or groomer handle it.

Your at-a-glance checklist

• ✅ Occasional stray cecotrope — normal, no action needed.
• ⚠️ Regular uneaten cecotropes — review the diet: more hay, fewer pellets, no muesli or sugary treats. Reassess after 1–2 weeks.
• ⚠️ Cecotropes matted to the bottom — clean the area daily and watch closely for flystrike, especially in warm weather.
• 🚨 Pasty or persistent soft cecotropes despite a good diet — book a vet to check teeth, weight and mobility.
• 🚨 Watery, liquid diarrhoea, a bloated or hunched rabbit, or a baby rabbit with runny poo — emergency, phone a vet the same day.

When to see a vet

See your vet promptly if the cecotropes keep coming despite a fibre-first diet, if your rabbit is losing weight, dribbling or dropping food (possible dental disease), if it's overweight or stiff and can't reach round, or if you find any true watery diarrhoea. Rabbits are prey animals and hide illness expertly, so a change in their droppings is often the first honest clue you'll get that something is off. Rabbit vet care can add up, which is one reason many owners look at cover — our guide to what pet insurance covers explains how policies handle small pets.

Cecotropes really are a small marvel of rabbit biology. Once you understand what they are, they stop being alarming and start being genuinely useful — a daily readout on whether your rabbit's gut, diet and mobility are all in good order.

Sources

• RWAF – Rabbit Digestion & Healthy Poo Guide
• RWAF – Rabbit Dirty or Sticky Bottoms
• PDSA – Diarrhoea in rabbits
• House Rabbit Society – Cecotropes
• Supreme Petfoods – The ultimate guide to caecotrophs