the other part of the day..the normal (or abnormal) animal things

I was talking to nicole on the phone today...that little emergency dog from the vet is not coming now, she found another place for her which is really good news for us. and little tina the little poodle was dropped off today by her dad. i don't often get teary during surrenders..but today i did..i just felt so badly for both of them. anyway...so i am telling nicole that all of the outstanding animals are now in except for calvin or whoever comes in place of him. and that is it...we are done. i am taking a break and not letting in any more.

of course not even 10 minutes later, i pull into the driveway from unloading the feed at the barn. and there is heather, KO's friend, in the front driveway with a duck in a cage. apparently her neighbors rotti had it but she and the neighbor managed to get him away. and what do city folks do with a stray duck..of course they bring it to saints! now i am not all that upset about this duck for a couple of reasons..really it is not suited to backyard living with rotti's so i can't very well ask them to keep him. AND believe it or not...this is a mini/tiny tea cup duck. there is no doubt he is full grown but he is smaller than our smallest chickens. next to floyd (who looks like a giant) this little guy looks like a midget.
he is pretty freaking adorable and i have named him tiny tim.

so tiny tim is happy to see a white duck just like him..(except bigger) on the other side of the wire. he doesn't know that floyd is a criminal duck with a bent and deviant brain. well he found out when floyd tried to fight with him and that little brave tiny tim started fighting right back at him. until floyd grabbed his little head and pulled it thru the wire and then REALLY started beating the crap out of him. then tim didn't want to fight anymore. he did get his head back and it was unscathed...poor tiny, beat up by a rottweiler and a giant monster duck, all in one day.

next we kicked edwina out of bed to see what she was going to do because little tiny tim was going to be living with her. first she had a bath and ignored him then she puffed up like a vulture and tried to chase him..but she has a bad leg and he is pretty quick so she gave up and went back to bed.

i just checked on him again...and for the first time in two whole days i laughed. remember that old scene with lucy pretending to be the reflective image in a mirror?..that was what tim and floyd were doing...they were imitating each other back and forth on each side of the wire. floyd was no longer in a killing rage, he was enjoying the interesting game of tiny following right along side of him..back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, in perfect synchronization.

i will never let floyd on the same side of the wire as tiny..he could and probably would hurt him quite badly. but it looks like they might eventually be wire side friends and at least floyd won't feel so alone now in his very bad duck pen.

in other news...

we had to pull out another classy chick..those bloody cannibals started pecking at her butt (this is not the one with the prolapse KO, this is the smallest one.) so once again we have a recovering chicken in a cage in the shop. these particular battery brainless birds are driving me freaking nutz!

i missed the morning vet appointments (but that is because of the shitty non animal part of the day) but the clinic managed to squeeze one of the 2 dogs in this afternoon...so i picked molly (new minnie is re-booked in for tomorrow.)

the vet said that tumor on molly's front leg is not a mast cell tumor like on her back leg. it is a tissue sarcoma which grows at lightening speed but doesn't really spread to other areas much. her lymph nodes are enlarged but that is probably either from the mast cell tumor or the chronic infected tumor on her front leg. he said bottom line..we can't take it off, there is not enough healthy margins..we could de-bulk it but there is not point cuz it will grow back again as fast the next time around. she is too old to take the leg off and soon because the thing is so ugly and vascular, it is going to spilt wide open and then she is going to have a major bleed. i asked him what he would do if she was his dog...(amazingly at 20, molly is so healthy, happy and bright.) he said there is nothing we can do to help her...nothing we can do to manage her...he would put her down and sooner than later ( less than 3 weeks, he thinks) to save her from the massive bleed out.

this just totally sucks. molly is not near to ready to go yet...i do not want to have to do this yet.