Posts Tagged ‘pets’

Very tired blogger today. Feeling under the weather. All you get is a picture of my two newest ferrets!

This morning, in that thrilling chill of early fall, I filled the water container of my pet geese while shivering a bit in my robe and before my morning coffee. We have three geese: Mith, a male of unusually gentle disposition, Alba, his snowy mate who has all the animosity he lacks, and their adopted “child”, another brown China goose that we call Audrey. Audrey walks about with that long neck extended like Hepburn and we don’t know yet whether it is a male or female goose. Audrey is all attitude; making noises at me this morning quite beyond the normal honk and hiss, these were more reminiscent of velociraptor sounds from “Jurassic Park.” They follow me back up the slight hillside, madly flapping their wings, and I know why I creep out in the morning light before coffee and clothing to give them food, water and freedom.

For joy. And no, not my joy, although there is plenty of that, too. For THEIR joy. This occurred to me this morning as I interacted with other pets of the household; I also have ferrets and my son has cats and a very large dog. Tossing a toy for the dog and scooping a ferret on my way into the house—a ferret that wiggled with sheer delight in my hands reminded me of this. I don’t have pets for what they give me, to my surprise. It is seeing joy in their furry or feathery bodies that makes me filled with satisfaction.

This is a hard world. For most people it is a constant struggle and often a losing battle. And for the majority of animals it is the same or worse. Part of my soul seems engaged in a utilitarian computation, seeking to balance the books of suffering and joy in the world. It seems of vital importance to me that we recall that the “good fight” is to make the books come out on the positive side, and I am such a small bit I can’t contribute that much. But every drop counts.

So, I pay the charities that count most first: Fisher House, Heifer International, Habitat for Humanity, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. Then I pay bills. Then I buy groceries. I look around my personal life and help where I can, I live responsibly and I care for my pets—some of which are rescues. And yes, the joy I see is part of the balance I want restored to my world.

I WILL make both love and war; I don’t hold back from stopping evil when I see it. But all work and no play (all smite and no blessing) makes for a bitter old bitch. I believe we all need to feel that we can give back to the world something for what we suck out of it like vampires at the Earth’s throat. After all, one must balance one’s personal metaphysical checkbook first!

It will be slave in the gardens day today….momentarily and before the heat strikes.

So, just a picture, no more, of Alba, Mith and their baby.  In the woodruff being lovey to each other.

Tea duck, that is.  Our newest pet…a wee black ducking that we think was a returned “Easter” duckling.  Daffy in the cup:

The first spring weeding of the Labyrinth began yesterday.  It is always a long task, involving a good deal of time crouched on my knees on stone, or duck walking around the spirals with a weeding tool in hand.  Yesterday, I “duck walked” in a whole new way: accompanied by a tiny black duckling.

The Labyrinth has been an evolving piece of art in terms of plant life there.  I tolerate many wildflowers there, such as the sweet violets.  Wooly thyme and moss live side by side and California poppies sprout on the larger outer rings.  But a local weed pest known as “shotweed” is my Garden Enemy #1.  It grows from a pretty rosette of leaves, sending up a stalk with non-descript white flowers very early in spring.  Before the last frost is over, long thin seed pods hang where the blossoms were a week before and the merest touch of the plant sends them shooting like a biological Claymore mine.  So, while I pull many weeds, I really do search and destroy for the shotweed before its blossoms can go to seed.

The little duckling, Daffy, was an impulsive purchase at the feed store—alone in a cageful of buff ducklings, I suspect he was a Easter duck that parents talked the feed store into accepting just to be rid of it.  Daffy is unusually fond of humans, far beyond the incubator raised human imprinting of other ducks we have known.  He is small enough to sleep in my hand and yet keeps up even as I stride from Labyrinth to compost bin, peeping frantically at me.  Daffy is companionable, staying close and pecking speculatively at the weeds I pull.  Tiny fluff that he is, he uses a water filled plant saucer as a bird bath; and when I find and drop an earthworm into said saucer  a madness of peeping, pecking and gobbling ensues.  When a big raven or a few crows go overhead, Daffy dives between my knees or climbs UP my knees to shelter in my shirt.

The weeding is less onerous with such a tiny feathery friend alongside.  I take breaks more often for the duckling’s sake, to feed him soft food from my fingers or fill his water saucer so he can cool down as the shade of morning vanishes and the sun bakes us both.  Usually, while weeding the Walk, my mind is filled with 21 gun salutes and folded flags; but this spring I am thinking of Easter egg hunts with children, violets in the garden and  the laughter of hide and seek.  And perhaps those for whom the Walk was built would prefer those memories as well?

I spent hands-on time with the geese this morning.  Carried them up to the back yard, and then kept Alba, the female to gentle her a bit.  She had not been handled much as a gosling and still is less friendly than her mate, Mith.  He came up close to comfort her and allowed himself to be stroked.

Six inches of snow lies round about us, with a sparkling blue sky overhead this morning.  But our snowy goose, Alba, has made a nest in the golden straw and is sitting.  Her first ever egg was yesterday, cold and muddy when I found it.  Today, is obviously different!  So, snowstorms aside, it MUST be spring, right?

Still ignoring the world.  This month, I buried not one, but two little old lady woozles.  This leaves the last of my geriatric ferrets, Logan the X-Woozle a solitary with no cage mates.  We will mourn together….he with kitty treats, me with Scotch or Black Russians.

March is here.  May it bring Spring to my saddened heart!

Those little fuzzballs are Taz and Teddi, two of my pet ferrets. I adore them and they light my life at the darkest moments.  Taz was near-starving in a pet store when we found him; he had been taken from his mom and not weaned well and didn’t know how to eat the solid food he was being offered.  Teddi was a rescue, REALLY starving—all skin and bones and bloated belly like a little Somalian child.

Ferrets are an impulse purchase for a lot of folks.  And then, when they are tired of them, they are horribly neglected or abused.  These wonderful little predators (no, they are NOT rodents—they kill rodents) suffer malnutrition and worse by under educated owners who just buy them as cute kits at a Petco store.

They are like fur clad two year olds, able to get into any place they can push their heads into, they eat things that block their guts and die agonizing deaths without surgery to save them.  Over the years since 1999, I have owned fifteen ferrets—some purchased as the pets of my heart, and many rescues brought to me.  They don’t die good peaceful deaths.  Teddi, the smaller of the two above, will likely die of the results of something like human inflammatory bowel disease.  The starvation of her first five months of life has likely damaged her gut and as she ages it will bother her more.  The treatment for this is oral steroids; the problem is, those eventually cause gastric ulcers that will make her bleed to death.

They get adrenal cancer at terrible rates, sometimes a slow death and sometimes an incredibly fast one.  One of my ferrets didn’t even show the initial symptoms of hair loss before he went adrenal hormone aggressive, and then collapsed in less than three weeks.  The cancer went “sideways” and killed his bone marrow, leaving him with so few red blood cells that his nose turned white and he was not getting air to his muscles.  He  must have been in agony even though I called the vet as fast as I saw his  color change.

Ferrets also die of insulinoma—a cancer that makes insulin producing tumors.  Their blood sugar gets so low they go into a coma, or seizure.  My little old lady woozle, Sorcha, is dying of this now.  I feed her often, coaxing her to eat so she won’t suffer agony in seizures.  The treatment for this is steroids, too—or in a younger ferret, surgery to remove the many tiny tumors.  Sorcha is bleeding from the steroids and cannot have any more.  The vet is coming on Monday to end this losing battle.

Ferrets are wonderful pets for dedicated pet owners. Please do not buy that cute kit on impulse cause the kid is begging.  Please study up first.  It isn’t just the $99 sale price in money, either.  You need a good cage, a secure cage—because they can OPEn doors of cages.  A good cage costs at least $200.  Vet bills are in the catastrophic category—Sorcha would have died 4 years ago from adrenal cancer without a surgery that cost $1200.

I recommend as a minimum that you read the book “Ferrets for Dummies” before you even TOUCH a beguiling kit at Petco.   And if you do touch one, hold one, and it bites you HARD?  That does not mean it is a vicious little animal, it means it is HUNGRY and not adapting to whatever the pet store is offering.  People who don’t study up on ferrets and buy them end up needing someone like me, who has to try to save the animal….and sooner or later ends up crying over a tiny grave.

We have had many pets over the years.  Blogger Mustang Bobby reminded me of his favorite dog ever this weekend; and that made me think of our favorite dog ever.  He followed my then young son home one day, looking so thin and starving we really did think he could eat Vikings for breakfast.  So we named this shepherd-Malmute-wolf cross dog “Grendel” and he lived with us for what we hoped would be forever.  He was already graying around the muzzle when he found us, and we had him for eleven years.  I still miss him dreadfully.