farla | Entries tagged with animals

I like the date, so here's the story of the lizard.

We have the lizard again.

The lizard has previously escaped twice, the first time being found by a friendly downhill neighbor and the second time he reappeared the next morning on top of the harness he wriggled out of, just to fuck with us. Both times were on my brother's watch and generally assumed to be in part the consequence of him wandering off and not telling me the lizard was lost for a couple hours.

All the many, many times the lizard ran off on my watch were failed escapes, as a few minutes or hours of crawling around eventually led me to him, so I figured it wouldn't be an issue.

Unfortunately, I went to fuss with the water, which had been turned off, and in the process of turning it on, one of the open hoses was turned on, and it was where the lizard was sitting, and he does not like suddenly being blasted with water, or so we assume because he was no longer there when I looked back.

Many hours of searching later, we accepted he was gone for the day. After the past two escapes, I wasn't worried because evidently none of the wild animals want to eat him. I put helpful flyers in all the downhill neighbors' mailboxes explaining we had lost him and he was completely harmless.

That morning, our doorbell is rung. Someone was driving by and saw him two houses up the hill, because he's a fucking asshole like that. The across the street neighbors immediately volunteered that they had no idea what he was so they figured it was ours.

"You have lost outdoor privileges," I told him once again as I put him in his cage. But then the next day he kept scratching at the glass, so I took him outside again and he ate some crickets and spiders.

Zo-zo was apparently jealous of the attention, and managed to get this bizarre bite wound that goes right next to and possibly into her ear canal. It smells of rot and sickness and there's a thick lining of dead flesh all the way down. I pulled the pus scabs off, washed it out and dosed in in iodine only for it to fill right back up.

Then Mela wasn't eating. Then she was eating if you finger fed her bits of wet food goo. Then she wanted to eat off the floor. Bowls aren't good enough for her. She also won't drink water out of a bowl and prefers the bigger and more awkward bowl in the bathroom, because. And she won't eat or drink by herself - we thought she was doing it on her own because when I'm around and occasionally bugging her, she'll move location and walk to food and water and back, but turns out if that doesn't happen she just stays wherever she's collapsed. Today she began crying and she's started trying and failing to jump on things, which is terrifying but probably a sign she's got more energy, so improvement?

She's also really, really into sleeping on laptop keyboards.

Then we just got two more cats who we're taking care of for my uncle, who it turns out isn't so great with cats. One of them has just run off and hid, which is normal, especially for a semi-feral. The other one is the most aggressive timid cat I've ever seen, and naturally these are both big muscular boycats. So I have a cat walking around hissing at everything while he tries to rub all over it (he actually rolls on his back and does this little wiggly dance to rub on the floor, hissing intermittently), and then crying and coming over because he's scared and he wants me to pet him and then attacking me because something startled him and he decided my hand was going to tear his face off. And I can't even smack him for it because he's obviously terrified out of his tiny mind. He went nuts when I shook my finger at him for attacking me. He also doesn't like people standing. Fundamentally opposed to the concept. I'm considering wrapping him in a towel and seeing if I can force him to stop acting like his claws are all that stands between him and painful death. Or if not at least clip his claws, I got blood all over my leg from standing too near him.

So, um, the chickens.

See, there's been this raccoon. It started coming around like one AM, but then earlier and earlier in the day, until finally it got dark one night and when we went to put the chickens away something had already gotten in. From the looks of it, it killed Fluffles but couldn't figure out how to get her back out. Somehow - we're still not sure how - Chubbycheeks got out. We found a huge patch of feathers midway on the lawn and then a trail of feathers leading across the street into the bushes and assumed it had made off it her, but the next day our neighbors called to say she was hanging out in the bushes by their house. She was an absolute mess, with her tail and back feathers gone, but with only a small bite mark. I cleaned her up and a lot of the damaged skin just sort of peeled off with healthy skin underneath. And now the whole area's covered in nailed-down chicken wire, and she gets put inside before it gets dark.

But it meant we were down to one chicken, which isn't good. Chubbycheeks has never been a cuddly chicken but she was desperate to be around us, to the point I sat out there to watch her and she jumped in my lap. Plus winter's coming up and a single chicken can end up freezing.

So, my great-uncle has chickens, and we went down to check them out. He was insistent we take the young healthy good laying ones, but I wanted the beat up ones, both because I figured they'd be less trouble on Cubbycheeks (who is not a dominant bird at all) and because I figured they'd be better off (ten of them in a pen maybe a third the size of our pen). Oh, also the young ones were mostly Leghorns and those things are apparently total assholes. We were actually intending to just borrow them over the winter, but he'd decided to get rid of them so we're keeping them. He wasn't there when we went back and the woman taking care of them agreed with us on taking the pathetic ones, so we got the old buff orpington, who's missing half her feathers and turned out to be so low on the pecking order even Chubbycheeks could successfully bully her, and then a plymouth rock, who did not put up with that bullshit and started attacking Chubbycheeks right back, which was good because it meant also protecting Blondie, who finally relaxed and could do normal chicken stuff. They're both big birds, so they should do well at keeping Chubbycheeks warm, and both extremely docile birds, although they weren't handraised like ours were so they're not used to handling. I'll cuddle them a lot over Thanksgiving.

That may sound ominous to you but that's silly, they're chickens.

So today I found a bunch of ducklings that'd just hatched. And that whole thing about the mom abandoning them if you mess with the nest is bullshit, so I picked up a couple because fuck it, they're baby ducklings, and one of them had a massive cataract over one eye, which made me realize that hey, the other eye did look kinda milky compared to all its siblings and long story short, totally blind.

What followed can be summed up as "Farla's adventures in trying to communicate simple things with stupid people". Things I did not need to know but was informed during this involved: the fact ducks take care of their young, the fact excessive handling stresses out ducklings, the fact wildlife rehabbers exist, the fact I should not assume the mother has abandoned the nest (she had), the fact I clearly did not know what I was talking about, the fact ducklings would be fine, the alternative fact that if there's anything wrong with a duckling it's "sick" and going to die, the fact ducklings naturally die a whole lot, and the fact nature needs to take its course. It took multiple tries to get across that I wasn't speaking about some hypothetical ducklings nor was I curious, in general, about the nature of duckling fitness. I wanted to know if any wildlife places could remove cataracts or not. This is a specific question, granted, but not really a complex one.

One of the major disconnects seemed to be that people assumed I was objecting to the philosophical concept of death. The philosophical concept of death was not the issue here. The issue was that this was not a sick duckling. It was not a duckling that was going to follow around its duck mommy until it keeled over in a few hours. It was an otherwise healthy duckling that was going to die a slow and horrible death. If the answer had been "no, we handle that by killing them" this would have been acceptable. What was not was everyone and their grandmother telling me it'd be "fine" and to just chuck it in the general direction of its mom and then never check back so we could all assume it worked while it died of exposure.

I ended up carting its siblings over to the mother (fuck you, everyone), who had run off after about half of them managed to get out of the nest because she kept getting attacked by other ducks. I attempted to bring the blind one over only for it to get in the water and swim in circles until it reached the shore again. I then found it a new mom with fewer babies who was extremely devoted and attacked me several times during the transfer, but once they got back on the shore it lay down to rest and didn't realize the rest of them left. I returned it to her, only for it to panic and swim in frantic circles while the new mom swam back and forth not understanding why it wouldn't follow her. Finally, I gave it to someone who said they could take care of it.

This is the second time I've had to deal with tons of bullshit like this. I get that generally problems are caused by people fucking around in the first place, but that doesn't mean the correct response is lying and stonewalling, and maybe if it wasn't obvious they were lying all the time people would be less likely to blow off what they said. I get that baby birds are really delicate. That's why if something really has gone wrong I need to be able to get information fast, not hit some sort of human phone tree where I say half a sentence, get told something that isn't an answer, then get switched to someone new every time I rephrase the question. And I get that maybe people do not trust my judgment in whether something has gone wrong, which is okay! I didn't trust my judgment for a good while there. But in that case it seems like the proper response is "ask me questions that would let you determine if something had gone wrong or if I'm just stupid", as not doing this means that I have to end up relying on my own judgment again.

I huggled birdies! In my hand because they were tiny. You have no idea how deliriously happy this makes me. I've had tiny pet mammals on and off for most of my life, but the chickens are really my first foray into avians and the chicklets, being flightless, could pretty much be handled like hamsters. The holding/restraint of tiny, angry birds is new and something I've been kind of horribly anxious about, but now I know how and know I know, and I'm actually very good at it and didn't hurt them at all and they bit me and it was adorable and they were adorable and :D so much.

Edit: Nononono, guys, these were not!chicken adults getting unwanted cuddles. Chickadeedeedeedee!

Petsitting again.

Here's what we have:

There's the hermit crabs, always good for crushing guilt and fear. They've been dying each time they molt. Mom brings them home and they promptly dig holes and prepare to molt. We find out that the diet we've been giving them is kind of like feeding a kid nothing but jello. We switch foods. They ignore it because they don't move when they're getting ready for molting. They're still alive, possibly, at the moment. One completed its molt but hasn't come out yet and we're still waiting to find out if it'll die or if the other one will kill it.

Hermit crabs suck.

Also, we need a third one or they'll be sad.

The hamster-gerbil-things are fine, except they've got bite marks on their ears. I don't know if they're trapped together in misery, or if they'd be lonely if I separate them. And this is one of those things you can't undo - if I separate them, they can't go back together. I'm thinking of setting up a second cage and connecting it, but Mom's pretty sure they'll just divide up the territory and fight more.

Also, they hate me.

We're taking care of dogs. Dogs suck. You have to walk them and you can't just leave food out for them and they shit on the floor if you don't let them out. The big dog we're taking care of for our neighbor is too high maintenance. And he wants to run when we walk and I feel bad if I don't but I can't keep up at him going at full speed even when I sprint and it's uphill everywhere here and it's exhausting just doing the walking. And the little dogs our friend gave us have the cats cowering in the basement (which is an improvement over not coming home at all because everytime they came near the little fuckers started barking their heads off and charging the door). They're also fat and needy. One isn't eating, and the other we don't want to feed because he's so fat. He doesn't want to go for a walk. He just wants to sit down on your lap and never ever move except to eat his food, the other dog's food, and the cats' food. He's a chihuahua. I tried to look up what the original purpose of chihuahuas is and after hitting a dozen pages that don't even mention it I found their purpose was to be sacrificed or eaten. Or both. They are like furry pigs if pigs had separation anxiety. And we have no idea if we should be feeding him or not since he's so incredibly obese. AND WHEN YOU EAT FOOD THEY JUST SIT AND STARE AT YOU. AND STARE. AND STARE.

And there's a betta, who isn't causing any problems.