Finding a vet that actually cares about small animals is difficult. It’s H O R R I B L E when you realise the people who are supposed to be caring for them really don’t give a toss.
daintydougal
11 years ago
*Hoping I’m not channelling that troll from the other day who was explaining how using ‘insane’ to describe a horrible person is ok really because of arglebargle. Is it uncools to use insane to describe inanimate objects. If so I’m sorrys. Please let me know and I’ll modify my language (which I’m trying to do in general but will try extra hards on here.*
Daintydougal, I used to get so angry at my parents for refusing to take my budgie to the vet. My budgie was attacked by my blue crowned conure, she had some toes ripped off and her lower jaw was completely snapped out of place. I cried and stayed with her, and kept putting anti bacterial stuff on the perches when I could. My parents wouldn’t take her to the vet even though she was bleeding a lot.
The next day she couldn’t eat, since her jaw was obviously in pain. I wanted to bring her to the vet to get liquid food or something but they still wouldn’t go. I just fed her some apple sauce and crushed food pellets(from the conure) mixed with water. Birds starve to death in like 24 hours btw.
Thankfully she lived, but her toes and beak are still messed up. Her lower beak grows but doesn’t have anything to grind it down, so it gets really long. It sticks out the side of her mouth. It’s not painful for her, it just looks funny.
She can still bite and eat too.
She’s 8 years old now.
daintydougal
11 years ago
auggziliary that’s literally horrific. My goodness. I’m so sorry. I wouldn’t have been able to handle that biz AT ALL. How could someone do that much less parents????????
I haz a sad
Daintydougal, at least she’s alive and happy now.
There is some karma with it, since she absolutely loves me yet doesn’t like my parents much. She follows me around the house and imitates the kissy noises I make at her. My parents always call her cute and try to play, but she just puffs up and bites them whenever they try.
dustydeste
11 years ago
OMG bunnies. Let me tell you the story of the first time I petsat (petsitted?), by which I mean, let me tell you about the time 8-year-old me was thoroughly terrorized by a fluffy albino bunny.
So there was this couple that lived down the street from us, I think the guy worked with my dad. They didn’t have any kids, but they DID have an albino bunny named Roger on whom they absolutely doted. He had a little pet door to go in and out, had the run of the whole house, and had a lovely selection of fresh veggies and fruit juice to consume. At some point, this couple decided to take a vacation for a week or two, so they offered my $10 a day to come by and take care of Roger. My duties included feeding him, opening the pet door in the morning, herding him indoors at night, cleaning up whatever poops he did inside, and vacuuming his bunny fluff off the carpet. I was gonna be rich!
So the first day, they had already let him out before they left, so I went down a bit before sunset to get Roger back inside so he wouldn’t get eaten by whatever manages to eat bunnies that are enclosed in cinderblock-walled backyards. It took me a while to find Roger huddled under a rosebush. I figured I could just grab him out, but no, that fluffy adorable bunny growled at me and took a swipe at my hand! Now, I know this doesn’t seem like much, but imagine that you’re eight and this apparently harmless creature has tried to maim you and, even worse, it is making a horrible noise that, to your mind, no bunny should ever ever make while glaring at you with creepy red eyes that seem to glow in the dying sunlight. I freaked right out, called my mom, and basically started crying, saying the bunny was terrifying and it tried to kill me.
My mom, of course, laughed her head off and told me to stop being a baby and just get the damn rabbit inside already, but I wouldn’t stop crying, so she finally agreed to walk down and help me. So there’s me and my mom standing in the backyard, and I point out Roger under the bush, and she goes to get him, and he growls at her, too. I swear, she jumped about ten feet in the air before admitting that, yeah, that was a pretty scary bunny.
So basically, the moral of this story is that that bunny from Monty Python and the Holy Grail was totally a real thing.
I’m really sorry, auggziliary. That’s horrible. :/
But you did your best and you helped her out and she survived because of you.
daintydougal
11 years ago
auggziliary I like animals that hold grudges. One of the reasons I prefer cats to dogs – dogs seem more prepared to take abuse (why that makes me dislike dogs and not the abusers of dogs I don’t know!) Whereas cats are more like screw this noise I’m outta here.
Katz – it’s an intelligence toy for dogs, that I bought at an online shop. It’s a bit cheaty of course, because rats don’t really have a problem with shoving stuff sideways. It’s a motion they are quite good at. Basically all intelligence toys for dogs and cats will do for rodents, as long as they don’t have to be strong to open/move anything.
The other ones think it’s pretty boring by now, btw, especially because I only put their normal food in it, but Pepper always dutifully gathers everything, then goes back into the cage to eat something or sleep. She’s never liked being out as much as her sisters/other companions, except for finding stuff to eat (and that’s why she’s as heavy as her two sisters combined, even on a diet of pellets (so she can’t select the fatty stuff) and vegetables).
My young ones are pretty interested in clicker training and can do one basic trick by now. There’s lots of stuff you can do with your ratties (or other rodents). 🙂
I’d like to have mice too, but again… I have to wait untill I finish nursing school and have a new apartment. That would be more of an aquariumthing then (with an interesting, big cage this has to be better than tv!), but as there are always lots of mice stuck at the local animal shelter, I’d like to home a few of them. The boyfriend is fine with all rodents, as long as he doesn’t have to clean up after them.
I probably haven’t been giving the best impression on keeping fish lately huh? Besides FUCKING ICH some species can live a really long time — plec was at least 14 and the oldest of his kind (with a confirmed age) is in its sixties! Clown loaches can live over a decade too.
And even the little 2-3 year life span guys…most of mine that I didn’t lose to ich hit 4 — had a couple live a surprisingly long time with obvious tumors that didn’t seem to bother them any.
So yeah, if you set up a loach tank, just loaches, you’ll have a better show then anything on TV (they are hilarious, clown loaches are aptly named). Be careful about ich and dear gods make sure you have a solid filtration system, and they can live longer than some dogs.
That filter note is because Every. Last. One. of the 10+ year old loaches I know of died when their filter kicked it. I used to use mine as an excuse why I couldn’t visit my parents for more than 72 hours (worked too)
Yeah, ich makes for an emotional rollercoaster, and I definitely have my why do I bother moments. But then I get a well stocked tank again and wonder how I could’ve ever thought of packing up the tanks.
Oh and if you get a plec when it’s tiny, you can train them to eat from your hand. To the point my previous one would eat from anyone’s had as long as they had a tubifex cube. (Freeze dried worms all shoved together in a cube, feels kinda like tofu to your hand, the plec rasping your fingers feels way weirder!)
And even ich…I mostly get it from fucking heat waves fucking with my babies’ immune systems. Never had much trouble when I had AC.
daintydougal
11 years ago
The other thing with tropical fish is the danger of power cuts.
daintydougal
11 years ago
’21 and 3 feet tall’ on the tv. I can only hope it’s as good as ‘the man with the 10 stone testicles’.
Yeah if your area is prone to power blackouts, under stock the tank. Buy yourself more time before the ammonia buildup gets bad, and get a battery operated bubbler. Obviously this won’t help if you lose power for a week (though, if you have running water, you can maybe get through it with Very Frequent Water Changes.
Hmm…I wonder if a planted tank would help with the lack of CO2 exchange caused by the lack of surface movement?
I’d never move to an earthquake zone though, the idea of the tank shattering is way too scary. (House fire is the biggest risk here, and my mother and I are in agreement about an evacuation plan if needed [both tanks are very close to windows, and have buckets big enough to hold the fish nearby]) And I probably don’t need to worry about it, closet we’ve had to a house fire involves my mother making bread!
Lol, hurricane Sandy cut power to most of the region. And not here. My mother joked that they knew what I’d do to them if I lost fish because of that storm.
Loaches though…yeah, you want a backup system. And for the cost of a well stocked loach tank, a generator is cheap (yes small ones at under ten bucks, but then you get a school of 20+…)
daintydougal
11 years ago
I remember a junk yard went up in flames in my home town and it knocked out the power for the whole area. I did the sensible thing and got the bus to the pub (lack of traffic lights is interesting) And my mum and her bf did the sensible thing by driving out to find a generator for his numerous tanks.
He used to breed angel fish and was very attached as they can live for like 30 years or something.
Daintydougal, yeah, I love my budgie even more now since she practically treats me like I’m a budgie and a best friend.
Sometimes animals can be too grudgey. My conure holds a grudge against all things that I like. Hence why he hates the budgie. He’s just really attached to me. If my dad talks to me he puffs up and mumbles. When I even look at the parakeet he puffs up. Also when I use the iPad around him he will try to block my eyes or attack it.
If I play with the budgie and get him riled up, and then play with him, you can tell he’s happy but has his feelings hurt. He forces his head under my hand to pet him and mumbles, like “I feel hurt because you play with the bird, and you might love her more than me, but I’m angry at you because you too, since you don’t see how I’m totally superior to her in every way.”
daintydougal
11 years ago
auggziliary, when you said the conure attacked the budgie I just assumed it was a breed of dog or something. I just googled it and felt very silly. haha. He sounds like a bit of a bully if you ask me!
Daintydougal — when Nemo hit I was more on edge than Sandy — Sandy worst comes to worst I could borrow a customer generator from the shop (seriously questionable ethics of course, but I’d totally put the lives of critters great and small above borrowing property without permission [at least, property that literally cannot be used without being borrowed without permission]). And there’s ALWAYS a handful there that are just there for a clean bill of health, so to speak, before being resold, because the customer returned it, is it okay to resell?
Nemo we were trapped. Like, I literally couldn’t get past the front steps until my brother shoved to the sidewalk. I’m 5’4″, we had 40″ of snow. It came to nearly my neck in other words.
You know…I need a new light fixture for the 55g, mine is finally dying (not the light, or ballast, the casing itself, it’s old and survived a half dozen moves, so not surprisingly really)…after that, maybe I can talk my father into going 50/50 with me for a generator, I know he wants one…
Lol, Sandy knocked out our ‘net. The shop had ‘net still. Guess where I was? (My mother was hilarious — I’m going to work to check my email >.< )
amandajane5
11 years ago
Holee fucking fuck. An old friend’s public facebook status from today:
“The world is full of great women, but a country’s greatness is not determined by the caliber of its women, it’s determined by the caliber of its men. America is the best country on the planet, because we have the BEST men on the planet. As a European friend corrected me: “Chauvinist? Being a chauvinist suggests that these guys actually know any other way to be.” Celebrate America, celebrate American men and be HAPPY to be an American woman b/c we could be from…uh ANYWHERE ELSE. Canada doesn’t really count does it?”
Bad, right? She’s also a black woman. She lives in Western Europe now, but seriously, the fuck?
I can almost get it, if it’s in the vein of judging society by how it treats its worse of members. Like, the flip side of less rape is less men raping => men there are better than average // than they were.
Obviously this doesn’t somehow moot the accomplishments of women. And chivalry is your measure? Really?
So yeah, but I’d go the inverse — you can tell how fucked up a country is by how those in power treat everyone else.
Also oh my god, I am about ready to STRANGLE my print story. I CAN NOT get the damned thing formatted, and I’ve gone through THREE computers and THREE file formats trying to get it!
The problem is such: the pages of my story have to be arranged as per PRINT order, not read order. Also, my print shop HAS to have in PDF. Of course, they don’t use Windows computers, so my .docs get scrambled all to hell.
I can only get the page order right in .docs. Of course. I CAN save the story to a PDF, but it puts the pages in read order, not print order. It’s looking like I might have to go in manually and BY HAND scramble FORTY FUCKING PAGES, all because my print shop can’t read .docs and I can’t get PDFs to work.
The story’s been ready for over a week! The COVER’s been ready for days! This and print shop holiday hours are the sole reason the story’s delayed.
I hate that we can put a man on the moon, and yet I can’t get this fucking automated.
We Hunted The Mammoth
Commissions or…insane garish mermaid ring! Only $20!
*Not belittling, good luck with the commissions*
Finding a vet that actually cares about small animals is difficult. It’s H O R R I B L E when you realise the people who are supposed to be caring for them really don’t give a toss.
*Hoping I’m not channelling that troll from the other day who was explaining how using ‘insane’ to describe a horrible person is ok really because of arglebargle. Is it uncools to use insane to describe inanimate objects. If so I’m sorrys. Please let me know and I’ll modify my language (which I’m trying to do in general but will try extra hards on here.*
Daintydougal, I used to get so angry at my parents for refusing to take my budgie to the vet. My budgie was attacked by my blue crowned conure, she had some toes ripped off and her lower jaw was completely snapped out of place. I cried and stayed with her, and kept putting anti bacterial stuff on the perches when I could. My parents wouldn’t take her to the vet even though she was bleeding a lot.
The next day she couldn’t eat, since her jaw was obviously in pain. I wanted to bring her to the vet to get liquid food or something but they still wouldn’t go. I just fed her some apple sauce and crushed food pellets(from the conure) mixed with water. Birds starve to death in like 24 hours btw.
Thankfully she lived, but her toes and beak are still messed up. Her lower beak grows but doesn’t have anything to grind it down, so it gets really long. It sticks out the side of her mouth. It’s not painful for her, it just looks funny.
She can still bite and eat too.
She’s 8 years old now.
auggziliary that’s literally horrific. My goodness. I’m so sorry. I wouldn’t have been able to handle that biz AT ALL. How could someone do that much less parents????????
I haz a sad
Daintydougal, at least she’s alive and happy now.
There is some karma with it, since she absolutely loves me yet doesn’t like my parents much. She follows me around the house and imitates the kissy noises I make at her. My parents always call her cute and try to play, but she just puffs up and bites them whenever they try.
OMG bunnies. Let me tell you the story of the first time I petsat (petsitted?), by which I mean, let me tell you about the time 8-year-old me was thoroughly terrorized by a fluffy albino bunny.
So there was this couple that lived down the street from us, I think the guy worked with my dad. They didn’t have any kids, but they DID have an albino bunny named Roger on whom they absolutely doted. He had a little pet door to go in and out, had the run of the whole house, and had a lovely selection of fresh veggies and fruit juice to consume. At some point, this couple decided to take a vacation for a week or two, so they offered my $10 a day to come by and take care of Roger. My duties included feeding him, opening the pet door in the morning, herding him indoors at night, cleaning up whatever poops he did inside, and vacuuming his bunny fluff off the carpet. I was gonna be rich!
So the first day, they had already let him out before they left, so I went down a bit before sunset to get Roger back inside so he wouldn’t get eaten by whatever manages to eat bunnies that are enclosed in cinderblock-walled backyards. It took me a while to find Roger huddled under a rosebush. I figured I could just grab him out, but no, that fluffy adorable bunny growled at me and took a swipe at my hand! Now, I know this doesn’t seem like much, but imagine that you’re eight and this apparently harmless creature has tried to maim you and, even worse, it is making a horrible noise that, to your mind, no bunny should ever ever make while glaring at you with creepy red eyes that seem to glow in the dying sunlight. I freaked right out, called my mom, and basically started crying, saying the bunny was terrifying and it tried to kill me.
My mom, of course, laughed her head off and told me to stop being a baby and just get the damn rabbit inside already, but I wouldn’t stop crying, so she finally agreed to walk down and help me. So there’s me and my mom standing in the backyard, and I point out Roger under the bush, and she goes to get him, and he growls at her, too. I swear, she jumped about ten feet in the air before admitting that, yeah, that was a pretty scary bunny.
So basically, the moral of this story is that that bunny from Monty Python and the Holy Grail was totally a real thing.
I’m really sorry, auggziliary. That’s horrible. :/
But you did your best and you helped her out and she survived because of you.
auggziliary I like animals that hold grudges. One of the reasons I prefer cats to dogs – dogs seem more prepared to take abuse (why that makes me dislike dogs and not the abusers of dogs I don’t know!) Whereas cats are more like screw this noise I’m outta here.
Aww, Pepper is adorable! I love her little waddly walk! And what’s that toy she’s playing with? It looks like a fun one for any
(I love pocket pets, but I do cry every time I lose one. I don’t have any now because I wouldn’t want them to get stressed with all the cats around.)
Katz – it’s an intelligence toy for dogs, that I bought at an online shop. It’s a bit cheaty of course, because rats don’t really have a problem with shoving stuff sideways. It’s a motion they are quite good at. Basically all intelligence toys for dogs and cats will do for rodents, as long as they don’t have to be strong to open/move anything.
The other ones think it’s pretty boring by now, btw, especially because I only put their normal food in it, but Pepper always dutifully gathers everything, then goes back into the cage to eat something or sleep. She’s never liked being out as much as her sisters/other companions, except for finding stuff to eat (and that’s why she’s as heavy as her two sisters combined, even on a diet of pellets (so she can’t select the fatty stuff) and vegetables).
My young ones are pretty interested in clicker training and can do one basic trick by now. There’s lots of stuff you can do with your ratties (or other rodents). 🙂
I’d like to have mice too, but again… I have to wait untill I finish nursing school and have a new apartment. That would be more of an aquariumthing then (with an interesting, big cage this has to be better than tv!), but as there are always lots of mice stuck at the local animal shelter, I’d like to home a few of them. The boyfriend is fine with all rodents, as long as he doesn’t have to clean up after them.
I probably haven’t been giving the best impression on keeping fish lately huh? Besides FUCKING ICH some species can live a really long time — plec was at least 14 and the oldest of his kind (with a confirmed age) is in its sixties! Clown loaches can live over a decade too.
And even the little 2-3 year life span guys…most of mine that I didn’t lose to ich hit 4 — had a couple live a surprisingly long time with obvious tumors that didn’t seem to bother them any.
So yeah, if you set up a loach tank, just loaches, you’ll have a better show then anything on TV (they are hilarious, clown loaches are aptly named). Be careful about ich and dear gods make sure you have a solid filtration system, and they can live longer than some dogs.
That filter note is because Every. Last. One. of the 10+ year old loaches I know of died when their filter kicked it. I used to use mine as an excuse why I couldn’t visit my parents for more than 72 hours (worked too)
Yeah, ich makes for an emotional rollercoaster, and I definitely have my why do I bother moments. But then I get a well stocked tank again and wonder how I could’ve ever thought of packing up the tanks.
Oh and if you get a plec when it’s tiny, you can train them to eat from your hand. To the point my previous one would eat from anyone’s had as long as they had a tubifex cube. (Freeze dried worms all shoved together in a cube, feels kinda like tofu to your hand, the plec rasping your fingers feels way weirder!)
And even ich…I mostly get it from fucking heat waves fucking with my babies’ immune systems. Never had much trouble when I had AC.
The other thing with tropical fish is the danger of power cuts.
’21 and 3 feet tall’ on the tv. I can only hope it’s as good as ‘the man with the 10 stone testicles’.
Yeah if your area is prone to power blackouts, under stock the tank. Buy yourself more time before the ammonia buildup gets bad, and get a battery operated bubbler. Obviously this won’t help if you lose power for a week (though, if you have running water, you can maybe get through it with Very Frequent Water Changes.
Hmm…I wonder if a planted tank would help with the lack of CO2 exchange caused by the lack of surface movement?
I’d never move to an earthquake zone though, the idea of the tank shattering is way too scary. (House fire is the biggest risk here, and my mother and I are in agreement about an evacuation plan if needed [both tanks are very close to windows, and have buckets big enough to hold the fish nearby]) And I probably don’t need to worry about it, closet we’ve had to a house fire involves my mother making bread!
Lol, hurricane Sandy cut power to most of the region. And not here. My mother joked that they knew what I’d do to them if I lost fish because of that storm.
Loaches though…yeah, you want a backup system. And for the cost of a well stocked loach tank, a generator is cheap (yes small ones at under ten bucks, but then you get a school of 20+…)
I remember a junk yard went up in flames in my home town and it knocked out the power for the whole area. I did the sensible thing and got the bus to the pub (lack of traffic lights is interesting) And my mum and her bf did the sensible thing by driving out to find a generator for his numerous tanks.
He used to breed angel fish and was very attached as they can live for like 30 years or something.
Daintydougal, yeah, I love my budgie even more now since she practically treats me like I’m a budgie and a best friend.
Sometimes animals can be too grudgey. My conure holds a grudge against all things that I like. Hence why he hates the budgie. He’s just really attached to me. If my dad talks to me he puffs up and mumbles. When I even look at the parakeet he puffs up. Also when I use the iPad around him he will try to block my eyes or attack it.
If I play with the budgie and get him riled up, and then play with him, you can tell he’s happy but has his feelings hurt. He forces his head under my hand to pet him and mumbles, like “I feel hurt because you play with the bird, and you might love her more than me, but I’m angry at you because you too, since you don’t see how I’m totally superior to her in every way.”
auggziliary, when you said the conure attacked the budgie I just assumed it was a breed of dog or something. I just googled it and felt very silly. haha. He sounds like a bit of a bully if you ask me!
Daintydougal — when Nemo hit I was more on edge than Sandy — Sandy worst comes to worst I could borrow a customer generator from the shop (seriously questionable ethics of course, but I’d totally put the lives of critters great and small above borrowing property without permission [at least, property that literally cannot be used without being borrowed without permission]). And there’s ALWAYS a handful there that are just there for a clean bill of health, so to speak, before being resold, because the customer returned it, is it okay to resell?
Nemo we were trapped. Like, I literally couldn’t get past the front steps until my brother shoved to the sidewalk. I’m 5’4″, we had 40″ of snow. It came to nearly my neck in other words.
You know…I need a new light fixture for the 55g, mine is finally dying (not the light, or ballast, the casing itself, it’s old and survived a half dozen moves, so not surprisingly really)…after that, maybe I can talk my father into going 50/50 with me for a generator, I know he wants one…
Lol, Sandy knocked out our ‘net. The shop had ‘net still. Guess where I was? (My mother was hilarious — I’m going to work to check my email >.< )
Holee fucking fuck. An old friend’s public facebook status from today:
“The world is full of great women, but a country’s greatness is not determined by the caliber of its women, it’s determined by the caliber of its men. America is the best country on the planet, because we have the BEST men on the planet. As a European friend corrected me: “Chauvinist? Being a chauvinist suggests that these guys actually know any other way to be.” Celebrate America, celebrate American men and be HAPPY to be an American woman b/c we could be from…uh ANYWHERE ELSE. Canada doesn’t really count does it?”
Bad, right? She’s also a black woman. She lives in Western Europe now, but seriously, the fuck?
I can almost get it, if it’s in the vein of judging society by how it treats its worse of members. Like, the flip side of less rape is less men raping => men there are better than average // than they were.
Obviously this doesn’t somehow moot the accomplishments of women. And chivalry is your measure? Really?
So yeah, but I’d go the inverse — you can tell how fucked up a country is by how those in power treat everyone else.
RE: amandajane5
I interpreted it as sarcasm AGAINST people who claim that sort of thing. And I don’t see what her race has to do with anything.
Also oh my god, I am about ready to STRANGLE my print story. I CAN NOT get the damned thing formatted, and I’ve gone through THREE computers and THREE file formats trying to get it!
The problem is such: the pages of my story have to be arranged as per PRINT order, not read order. Also, my print shop HAS to have in PDF. Of course, they don’t use Windows computers, so my .docs get scrambled all to hell.
I can only get the page order right in .docs. Of course. I CAN save the story to a PDF, but it puts the pages in read order, not print order. It’s looking like I might have to go in manually and BY HAND scramble FORTY FUCKING PAGES, all because my print shop can’t read .docs and I can’t get PDFs to work.
The story’s been ready for over a week! The COVER’s been ready for days! This and print shop holiday hours are the sole reason the story’s delayed.
I hate that we can put a man on the moon, and yet I can’t get this fucking automated.