A life hopefully saved, but at what cost?

Last week I wrote about Archie, my heart rat, and his having a pituitary tumour (PT). I was WRONG and boy do I feel bad about it. I'm the lady who people used to say "crazy rat" before "lady" because I had, and still have, an inordinate fondness for the creatures. I ran a small animal rescue for a few years. I still maintain a website called Mooshika, which I leave up for the public to find out how to adopt non-dog-non-cat creatures and help them out in the special ways they need be given proper appreciation for.

I've said all along that when a small animal needs to go to the vet, RUN, don't walk. But because I felt I have such fabulous experience, I figure I can diagnose something I've seen before, right? Wrong-o. This is the second time that I've misdiagnosed something else as a PT. The first time was an ear infection, which was treatable and the little guy recovered. This time, poor little Archie waited for ages for me to go "wait, you're not losing your mind yet. Maybe you don't have a PT. Maybe you have PNEUMONIA." 

So for two weeks - since the day he got his paw bit by Dweezil (my bully rat), which set off the stress and unhealthy/unhappiness - Archie degenerated, lost 100 grams or more, and patiently waited for me, his irresponsible caregiver, to get him help. And it wasn't the money causing the delay, because it doesn't matter whether you spend it at the beginning of the illness, for you will spend it at the end if you are a humane and engaged pet keeper. Thankfully, I did not pay more than expected, doing the right thing. No, the cost is borne by Archie, for having to wait, and how the long illness will entail an even longer recovery, and there's no way to tell how his quality of life will be when he's an old man. And I get to lose my friend well before he ought to go, and I feel guilty, and I'll remember it for the rest of my life.

The vet recommended euthanasia, but Archie didn't hang on so long just to be let down and put down. Finally, my years of animal nursing are doing some good. Archie gets 12 cc of electrolyte solution with Baytril, an antibiotic, injected sub-cutaneously twice a day. He also gets a painkiller three times a day. He gets Boost mixed with peanut butter and baby food, mixed thinly enough to go through a syringe, which is the way he's been eating for the past two-and-a-half weeks, as much as he can eat. It is with a sigh of relief that in the past few days, his worst days for lethargy and low appetite, he has peed (thanks to all that rehydration, and proper kidney function) and pooped a few times (a sign he's getting enough food). Today, though he's all squinty-eyed and tired, he has had the most energy since Thursday, so I feel he will pull through despite great odds. He has been supporting some of his own weight and involving himself in some of my handling. (He almost protested having a bath.) It takes about half an hour to get 2 to 3 mL of food into him, and I do this at 8 AM, 10 AM, 4 PM, 10 PM, anytime else I can get in, and anytime I wake up between 2 and 4 AM. Happily, it is the early-morning feeding that he is at his best, because he takes more food and he bruxes, which is how rats and rabbits show happiness.

Look at this needle. Imagine getting one in proportion to your body size!

No other pictures of Archie for here, because it's just too pathetic to see him like this, and some people just wouldn't understand.

In other rodent news, the humping squirrels are always at my back door, play-fighting. So they're not humping, though if they're probably siblings, it wouldn't stop them when real mating season comes. And today, they met Hervé.

And my other braggable: a clean and organized garage.

Plague is still a problem for wildlife

When people blame rats for the plague that swept through Europe many times over the Middle Ages, I remind them of the context of the time - no one knew what caused it until early last century. Even then, rats die of plague, just as humans do, and they are not the only carrier of the disease.

New discoveries in conservation biology show that plague is a serious problem for wildlife throughout the West, and rats have nothing to do with it. You can listen to a 5-minute radio documentary about it, or read the transcript, on NPR.org.

Stock à donner pour les souris, rats, et amateurs

Je suis désencombrement des choses que je n'avais pas eu le courage de se débarrasser - de l'entreprise est en jeu pour libre, je poste ici d'abord parce que je ne peux pas imaginer une meilleure façon de payer avant la générosité J'ai reçu des autres quand j'ai eu une refuge et puis chaque fois que j'avais besoin d'une petite chose supplémentaire pour les rats, les souris et les lapins…. En outre, quelques-uns de ces choses peuvent être envoyés par la poste. Le reste : un voyage à ma maison, à Montréal.

1. J'ai trouvé difficile de lâcher - oui - A Habitrail Safari parce que je sais que même si ce que j'ai n'est pas en bon état , dans l'état de la boîte (souris ont mâchés, après tout) , c'est un kit complet, et un jour il va avoir recours "chintz". Donc, si cela vous intéresse, et vous avez un hamster nain ou une paire ou trio de souris adultes , c'est la cage pour vous.
2. Une roue de Silent spinner, rouge, ≈ 7 " de diamètre.
3. Livre d'un jeune enfant, "Hallowe'en Mice!" par Bethany Roberts
4. Une cage de cabinet, très bien (c. professionnellement ) construit à partir de la mélamine et de bons matériaux , vu ici: Flickr photo , qui en ce moment je suis en utilisant en sections comme une console de télévision et meuble de rangement .
5. La cage de voyage plus élémentaire comme jamais. Juste une cage avec un fond, en utilisant des clips de pliant pour le maintenir en place. Mon Dweezil ou les deux garçons se déplacent en elle parfois, mais j'ai décidé d'arrêter affichage en utilisant mon porteur de chat.
6. Art des rongeurs: Ce pourrait être un rat ou un chinchilla, mais allez ici : S'appuyant sur le plastique, le papier et le bois
7. Un harnais de furet SuperPet, comme neuf.
8. Une balle Critter, de taille pour une ratte. Bon pour cette fille qui est toujours sous les pieds !

Je suis à la recherche autour d'autres choses pour se débarrasser, donc si vous venez ici c'est sure qu'ils s'apportent plus que vous êtes venu ou genre comme ça.

Springtime – go for a walk - and adopt

Now that the paths are clear and the weather is mostly sunny, it's time to get out there and start watching wildlife. Just tread very, very carefully, or you might frighten some poor small rodent to death! Meadow voles are out - as they surely are during winter, running under the snow - and this blog post from a few years back found a recently-deceased specimen and showed it in good detail.

The Canadian Wildlife Federation has a Walk for Wildlife campaign - join it now, log your kilometers, and by the end of the summer you may have raised a lot of money and earned a lot of badges. We need to conserve habitat for all creatures - of which rodents are just a small, but significant, portion. Recently, The Nature of Things aired an episode on beavers, which left one cheering for them and the awesome work they do to restore habitat and water for everybody. Cheers also for the perception and innovation of one wildlife dude, Michel Leclair, (link to a radio interview) who found a way to redirect beavers and keep them doing good work, changing our ways to prevent them from flooding out our roads - without killing them, as most places still do (and hopefully will smarten up about).

More about a new/old pet adoption after the jump…

Happy Groundhog Day!

I believe that every region should have its prognosticating groundhog, but that it is a wild one - and so perhaps once a year we try - not too hard, mind you - to wake up a real groundhog and see what he or she thinks in front of the rolling cameras. Apparently, because today was overcast, no shadow was to be seen, and so spring will come early. 

This here fat one was enjoying the grounds at the Montreal
beach in summer, hence the high roly-poly chubb factor.

How to tell the difference between a groundhog and a prairie dog

How some of the Vancouver Island Marmots, the most endangered of the species, are doing.

Today is also the birthday of yours truly. And I can't help but be happy about it. In a little while, a few friends are coming over and we're making a cake. And then off to the pub for the evening. Let this be a record for now how I looked then, being today. 

Happy Robbie Burns' Day

To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough, November, 1785
This is one of the English language's best poems, by one of the world's greatest poets, Robert Burns. He was a 26-year-old farmer when he wrote it.

Die Antwoord, language, and rats

So my head exploded rather late in the game - not being a kid anymore means you don't find things out unless you have a reason to hang out with the cool ones - when I saw a few Die Antwoord videos over the Christmas holidays. I don't know whether I have kids to blame for seeing it or whether it was my South African connection: the first friend I had in this-city-before-it-became-mine is a guy who has now been living in South Africa for probably 15 years. His brother has been my friend since I moved here, so he's now the officially longest friend I've got here. He's a college professor, so if Paul didn't tell him about Die Antwoord, then the kids did. We stayed up late one night and watched movies and stuff on YouTube. Eggnog was involved. Good times.

Die Antwoord means "The Answer." The reason I knew that was because before I lived in Denmark, I took a German course to break down my linguistic patterns and help me learn Danish as fast as I could take it in once I got there. I also had an ex-boyfriend who was German, who was always always bickering with me (jane: i am asking some kind of a question exBF: No. What/who do you think you're asking? Are you insane or just merely annoying? jane: !!!) and so when I learned "Ich habe eine frage" (I have a question) I made sure to also learn "Das ist nicht die gute antwort!" (That is not the good answer!) 

Afrikaans is a language derived from Dutch, which I learned is a Plattdeutsch - Low German - derivation. Danish was said to also be Plattdeutsch in the course I took, but I knew it was not, although the verbs in German and Danish are often similar because, with such proximity, they have had significant influence on each other. (When in Denmark, there are special Danish classes for German speakers because they advance through the material much faster than English and ESL students.) So every once in a while, a Die Antwoord lyric in Afrikaans makes some sense. And I'm a happy person listening to music that has non-English-non-Romanic stuff smattered throughout. It extends our culture in a way that I like and which others may not expect. 

So, obviously, Yolandi Visser keeps pet rats, and you can see them in lots of photos with her and a few with Ninja too in the music videos. In one interview, Yolandi said she had 30 rats. At one point I had 27. It was temporary. (I also went above 30 for short duration rescues.) Do you have any idea how much work it is to keep that many pet rats? Imagine…you have four apartment buildings in your basement, and some of those apartments have 6 people in them, and some are split into levels and you have 4 or 5 in each. 24 little people in your home! 30 little people in your home! That sounds like a party! And then you have to clean up afterwards.

I do wish that in one photo and one interview, she hadn't held the rats by the tail. It's true that depending on how you do it AND how much that rat trusts you, you can do it without hurting them, too many people are dwankie and will just grab a rat by the tail and that's very, very bad! Once the rat is squeaking at you, you've already hurt it - and the risk with the tail is great. 

Speaking of tails… check out the fantastic rat suit she wore in the video for "Evil boy:" 

A female Hotot.

 Bonus: at least two of the videos have rabbits, so somebody in their group likely has a pet rabbit.

Even the bling and sparkly lights can't stop that glare of disapproval.

Note: If this is how you've come to hear of Die Antwoord, I recommend going through their videography in order of the singles, but definitely check out Zef Side. (It reminds me and an Ontarian friend of Keswick.) That way you get more context about the stories they're telling in video, lyrics, and interviews. And yes, they're a bit shocking, so if you don't get it in context, you might be turned off ("ugh, he's so fugly!" I said to my friend watching the first videos. And ewww has come up a few times too). But something about them is captivating and serious enough to think about. I've even got an article idea to pitch - but hey, if the comments here spark up like they usually…don't… let's go!