The sight is pathetic.

Sticky eyes, swelling and sores on the face.

Passers-by in Frankfurt's green spaces have to watch vegetation these days and weeks.

Rabbit plague is currently depleting wildlife in the genus and there is no way to stop it.

Myxomatosis is the technical term for the disease commonly known as rabbit plague.

The animals seem disoriented or apathetic on their way to death.

Daniel Meuren

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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Symptoms appear after an incubation period of three to nine days.

The affected rabbit shows reluctance to eat and drinks little.

With an acute course of the disease, swelling and inflammation appear on the eyelids, mouth, ears, lips and genitals.

After a period of suffering of ten to 14 days, the disease very often ends with the death of the animal.

Brown hares are spared

Myxomatosis is an annually recurring viral disease that occurs almost exclusively in domestic and wild rabbits. Brown hares are largely spared from this disease.

This year it is apparently much more serious than in previous years, the city in any case noted significantly more calls from concerned people who reported the suffering of the animals.

"The disease is mainly transmitted by mosquitoes," says Christina Geiger, veterinarian at the Frankfurt Zoo.

Fleas and direct contact among the animals also contributed to the spread, but played a subordinate role.

"This year with a damp spring and especially early summer and also a damp autumn with the abundance of insects that we can all feel is predestined for the virus to spread accordingly."

The myxomatosis pathogen is a subspecies of the smallpox virus that comes from South America.

According to the veterinarian, it was introduced in the fifties of the last century to decimate rabbits in Europe, but then got out of control and attacks the population with varying degrees of severity every year.

In contrast to the conspecifics in South America, who have always been used to the virus, the disease affects animals more heavily in Frankfurt and the rest of Europe, and the course is more severe.

In extreme years, when high population pressure also contributes to the spread of the disease, virtually the entire population becomes infected.

An estimated 40 to 60 percent of the infected animals perish.

Just as much as rabbits in the wild, domestic animals and rabbits are also at risk. If they are infected by the virus, they can also hardly be cured. However, the domestic rabbits as well as the breeding specimens in the clubs have the advantage that their owners have opportunities to protect the animals. On the one hand, during these weeks you can make sure that your rabbits do not come into direct contact with fellow wild animals.

You can also provide the cages of the animals with mosquito repellent.

Above all, there is the possibility of a vaccination, which largely protects against a severe course of the disease.

Zoo veterinarian Geiger, for example, has also immunized her own two rabbits, as she says.

The vaccination works for six months, so it has to be refreshed every six months.

It is worth it to most rabbit owners, the vaccination is very common and is almost always part of keeping the animals.

Vaccination for wild animals is not possible

Such help is not possible for animals in the wild, as the public order office reports. With a view to the wild rabbit population in Frankfurt, vaccination is an impracticable undertaking. Only those animals that recover from the disease are armed against another serious illness in the following years thanks to their immune system, which explains the sudden increase or decrease in the number of deaths from year to year. Young animals are then of course particularly susceptible.

Since myxomatosis is not a notifiable or notifiable animal disease within the meaning of the Animal Health Act, no counts are made, so there are no reliable estimates of the number of animals that have died, for example in the urban area, or of the rabbit population in general, says the regulatory office.

"We do not have any knowledge about the wild rabbit population in Frankfurt, not even in the beginning."

The only thing left for the city to do is to receive reports of dead wild rabbits in the public space via the FES waste disposal company.

The employees on the service telephone with the number

0800/20080070

forward information about carcasses, but cannot take care of live animals, as a spokesman for the

public

order office emphasizes.