OR THE BIRDS

Talking birds, in fact!

We’ve had some astonishing experiences with talking birds. Some we’ve treated or boarded. And after practice days, we had our own scarlet macaw, “Charlie”, who was truly a marvel at speaking his piece.
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PEOPLE ARE FUNNY!

Looking for humor in the practice of veterinary medicine mostly means watching people.

I’m convinced animals have a great sense of humor and really like to play. Like humans, it’s most pronounced in the young, and slows a bit with age. But unlike a lot of humans, they quickly get to playing, even into old age…it’s like they’re not self conscious about it, or haven’t forgotten how to do it. But that’s another story.
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Porcine Manure 201

No Sartorial Compatibility Here!

I think it was that same spring. it was a day time call to a hog farmer with a few sick feeder pigs. He kept them on a “feeding floor’. That is, a fenced concrete pad where he fed hogs for the market. It was well below freezing but a bright sunny day.
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DIRTY DANCING, OR, IT COMES WITH THE TERRITORY
(Or…maybe you can find a better title?)

You can’t get very far in understanding veterinary medicine without discussing two prominent areas of mammalian physiology, ...elimination and reproduction! Let’s take on elimination first:

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INSTANT RECOVERY!

You might know the most satisfying cases are those you can cure immediately, if not sooner.

There were some “naturals”. Cesareans were always gratifying, changing real distress into healthy new life for all concerned. And in the dairy cattle world, “hypocalcemia,” a peculiar calcium deficiency right after calving. Here, a bottle of calcium gluconate intravenously to a new mother that looked like she was going to die had her up and eating...within minutes.
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What Goes Around, Comes Around

Shortly after we moved into the new animal hospital, we got a call early one winter morning from the owner of a small flock of sheep just outside of a nearby small town.

There was just a little snow on the ground, otherwise bright.
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The kids named this little fuzzy-red ball with a head and beak too big for his body, “Charlie”. Don’t know where they got it.

I got him on a visit to “La Mosquito” while on our Honduran expedition. That’s a story in itself because three of us were dropped by light plane in this desolate, remote jungle-ish area about 200 miles from where we lived, for a week of work. Those with me were a Peace Corps worker and a visiting Moravian missionary. During the incredible week of new experiences, we gathered all kinds of memorabilia so that when the plane came to pick us up, we were crowded with artifacts. I alone had a carved mahogany oar, a sawfish bill about 3 feet long, several exotic butterflies, a big round glass Japanese fishing float that had washed up on the beach, and little Charlie. I bought Charlie from an Indian that had found him beneath a nest and really hungry.

It was on this trip that I saw flocks of scarlet macaws that were just gorgeous, in flight and close by in small trees....and a big green sea turtle laying her eggs on the beach at night. I also saw the natives catch the sawfish, from a small two-man dugout canoe...a 2 or 3 hour experience where the outcome was in doubt for much of that time. At one point the sawfish “teeth”, pointed laterally from his upper beak, got stuck in the side of the mahogany canoe, adding extra drama to the episode.
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