10/01/2026
Critical Care herbivore is a powdered recovery diet that we give to many patients that are struggling to eat due to injury or illness. This diet is essentially ground up hay with other vitamins and nutrients that are required for your pet's health. Critical care is flavored, so it is easier to entice a sick patient into eating, but most patients have to be syringe fed.
We provide this diet especially to guinea pigs, chinchillas, or rabbits that are experiencing a GI stasis episode. This helps encourage the pet's gastrointestinal tract to remain in motion by introducing fiber even when they don't want to eat on their own.
A bag of Critical Care may be sent home with your pet after hospitalization or surgery. The first video shows how our staff makes the critical care we feed in clinic and the consistency you should aim for when you are mixing it up for your pet at home. The second video shows how to syringe feed your pet.
Bober here is a great model for how to "burrito" your pet as well as where to go into the mouth while syringe feeding. You may notice his missing eye and odd haircut, but no worries thats the procedure he was here for that day!
Before leaving the clinic, a technician will go over all of this with the owner, but it can be quite challenging to do for the first time! We will be doing follow up posts with tips and tricks on making this process a little bit easier.
