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It's forced breathing/cough/sneeze...could be caused by blocked nostrils due to the skin popping loose for shed inside the nostrils but that's typically not very loud or cause any serious labored breathing...usually just a light wheeze or whistle when it's nose skin flaking off...or it could be blocked trachea/hacking up phlegm. They don't have a diaphragm so it's hard for them to clear the airway and usually they just aren't very effective in doing so. This is why lower respiratory infections are so dangerous. If it continues and you start seeing yellow gunk splattering the cage walls and glass, drop the humidity and raise the ambient temp to about 91 degrees 24/7 immediately and get him some antibiotics asap....Lower RI (Pneumonia) isn't always as outwardly evident as upper RI. With upper RI, you will usually see a lot of runny snot and open mouth breathing/wheezing. Typically upper precedes lower but not always....or the upper symptoms sometimes go unnoticed and the infection moves deeper because it wasn't treated...
Another possibility is parasites. Many parasites larva that live in the gut as adults, burrow through the skin and get in the blood...travel to the lungs and live there drinking blood till they pupate. Then right as they are becoming adults, they will crawl up the trachea, out of the epiglottis and into the back of the mouth/top of the throat where they are swallowed into the stomach and latch on once they get in the intestinal track where they lay eggs into passing feces, continue drinking blood (1 adult hookworm can drink up to 1 full cc of blood per day) Anyway, at the stage where they are coming up through the glottis to crawl over into the esophagus...they will often cause some hacking/coughing/as you describe howling. It's not hard to imagine a glob of worms coming up your trach and into your mouth as being something uneventful for any animal. I imagine it's quite uncomfortable.
Next time you get poop, I'd get a fecal done pronto.
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Last edited by JuliusSqueezer; 10-07-2008 at 02:08 AM.
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