26 May 2026
Specific hopes of improvements in treatment for rabbits were raised during a major conference on the disease.
Allister Webb
Job Title
Stuart Carmichael.
Animals living with osteoarthritis (OA) could benefit from lessons learned in the treatment of other species with the disease, conference delegates have heard.
Clinicians were urged to consider “the whole patient” during the Veterinary Osteoarthritis Alliance’s (VOA) congress in Loughborough.
That plea also followed suggestions that knowledge gained from one species could potentially aid the treatment of others.
The theme was outlined by alliance co-founder Stuart Carmichael, whose keynote address argued that looking at other species could help clinicians to see things they had previously missed in their own cases.
But RVN and VOA board member Nichi Cockburn later went further in a joint presentation on understanding the disease in rabbits.
She said: “What we’re asking in dogs and cats is exactly the same as we should be in asking in rabbits.”
She also argued that “mirroring” the management of the disease in cats could also benefit rabbits, amid subsequent suggestions that care for the latter is currently around 10 or 15 years behind their feline counterparts.
Speaking in the same session, vet and RVC exotics and small animal lecturer Elisabetta Mancinelli was sceptical of Miss Cockburn’s suggestion that owner checklists could help to identify issues earlier.
But she urged delegates not to overlook details of the animal’s history they collect from owners, including about their diet.
She said: “We can make a lot of recommendations based on the information we collect from the owners.”
Dr Mancinelli was also among the speakers to reflect on the challenges of identifying and evaluating pain in species where it could be easily missed.
Reptiles can also present similar challenges as indicated by the title of a subsequent presentation by veterinary physiotherapist Matt Shackleton, which described their musculoskeletal pain as a “silent pandemic”.
He said issues of behaviour and activity were only “rarely” considered in such cases as he argued treatment needed to go beyond the environment such species are housed in.
He said: “It’s a symbol of what VOA is about – looking at the whole patient.”