hard to find advice on

Other pets

Rats, mice, hedgehogs, fish, chickens and everything else.

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Other petsNate14d agoRat owners: what is your cage and bedding setup?Cage model, bedding, how often you are changing it, how many rats. Ventilation matters more for rats than for almost anything else and the setups people land on vary a lot. Also interested in what you tried first and dropped.0 repliesNo vet yet
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Other petsPawsRx Team14d agoWhat do you keep that the vets near you have never treated?Rats, hedgehogs, chickens, fish, something less common than that. If finding care has been hard, say what you keep and roughly what area you are in. We are building the directory around this exact problem, so the answers are genuinely useful on our end too.0 repliesNo vet yet
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Other petsPawsRx Team15d agoNew fish keep dying? It is almost certainly the nitrogen cycle, not bad luck.The most common fishkeeping mistake is buying the tank and the fish on the same day, and very few pet stores will tell you not to. Here's the actual mechanism. Fish waste and uneaten food break down into ammonia, which is toxic. In an established tank one group of bacteria converts ammonia into nitrite, which is also toxic, and a second group converts nitrite into nitrate, which is comparatively harmless and gets removed by water changes and plants. Those bacterial colonies take weeks to establish. A brand new tank has none of them, so ammonia spikes with nothing to process it, then nitrite does the same, and the fish are burned and suffocated by their own water. That's new tank syndrome. It's why the first batch dies and, if you replace them right away, why the second batch dies too. The fix is cycling the tank before any fish go in it. Fishless cycling means adding an ammonia source, either pure ammonia or a pinch of fish food left to rot, then testing until you watch ammonia rise and fall, nitrite rise and fall, and nitrate climb while the other two sit at zero. That sequence is the colonies coming online. Takes anywhere from about two weeks to two months. Bottled bacteria helps some, and a used filter cartridge or a cup of substrate from a friend's established tank helps a lot. You need a liquid test kit to do any of this. The API freshwater master kit is the standard one. Paper strips aren't accurate enough at the low end where it actually matters, and "the water looks clear" tells you nothing, because ammonia is invisible. Last thing, since it comes up constantly: a betta in a bowl is subject to exactly the same chemistry as everything else. The small volume makes it worse, not better, because there's less water to dilute anything. A cycled, filtered, heated 5 gallon is the usual minimum and the fish behaves like a completely different animal in one.0 repliesNo vet yet
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Other petsMichael15d agoIf you have pet rats, respiratory disease is not a maybeRats are fantastic pets and this is the tax on them. Nearly all pet rats carry Mycoplasma pulmonis. It's not a sign you bought from a bad breeder, it's effectively universal in the pet population and usually passed from the mother. Plenty of rats carry it and look completely normal for a long stretch. Then age, stress, bad air quality or another infection tips the balance and you get the familiar picture: sneezing, a red brown crust around the nose and eyes, clicking or wheezing on the breath, hunching, weight loss. The crust throws people, so worth saying: that red stuff is porphyrin, not blood. It's a stress and illness signal, and a little is normal, a lot isn't. This gets managed, not cured. Vets treat flares with antibiotics, often doxycycline plus enrofloxacin, sometimes long courses, sometimes a nebulizer. Rats treated early do a lot better than rats you watched for a week to see if it settled. The part you control is the environment. Ammonia off urine wrecks their airways and accelerates all of this, so bedding gets changed more often than feels necessary and ventilation matters, which means a wire cage rather than an aquarium. No cedar, no raw pine, nothing dusty. Aspen, kiln dried pine or paper. Two more things worth knowing going in. Rats are intensely social and shouldn't be kept alone, so same sex pairs or groups, always. And mammary tumors are very common in females, usually benign and usually removable if you find them while they're small, so run your hands over her once a week. Spaying reduces that risk substantially and is worth raising with a vet who sees rats regularly. They live about 2 to 3 years, which is the real downside of rats. Everything above is about making those years good ones.0 repliesNo vet yet

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A free pet health forum, open to read without an account and free to post in. It is split by animal rather than run as one room, because a rabbit question and a labrador question have almost nothing to do with each other and the exotic ones get buried everywhere else.

Veterinarians answer here, and their replies are labelled. A reply marked as coming from a veterinarian means PawsRx checked an active license against the issuing state board before that badge appeared, and the whole check is written down. Everyone else posts as a pet owner and is shown as one. That distinction is the point: the usual problem with pet advice online is not that it is wrong, it is that you cannot tell who is talking.

A veterinarian answering a thread is giving general information, not diagnosing your animal, and says so on every reply. PawsRx does not review or endorse what anyone posts, and nothing here replaces examining a pet. Asking a vet privately is the other half of this, free as well, if your question is not one you want to post in public.

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Nobody minds a beginner question, and the ones that get the best answers are specific: the animal, how long it has been going on, and what you have already tried. The guides cover the questions that come up most, including finding a vet who treats exotics and what to ask when you call a clinic.