How The West Was Spun

I think I'm calmed down enough now

to tell you about my morning.

I went out at 5:45 like I always do to feed in the barn.  The horses weren't in the barn like they usually are, but were standing outside the barn and did NOT want to come in.  When I coaxed Diggs in for breakfast with his hay, he would grab a bite and turn and wheel out of the stall.  Hap didn't want to come in at all and stayed outside on the far side of the fence leading up to the barn.  Hm.... very odd, but I attributed it to the windy morning and the noise of light rain against the tin roof of the barn.

So, I get them as settled as they will be and I turn to go feed the bunnies.  Oddly, I notice 2 of the hanging water bottles have been knocked off, but occasionally that does happen (usually only 1, but ...shrug....whatever...right?).  I get Pippin his banana treat and I notice there are large gobs of fur pulled out lying on the bottom of his hutch.  Hm..... again....... Then I go to feed Newman his banana, and as I hand that to him, I notice there is blood on the food cup in his hutch.  WTF?

Then I take a closer look at Newman, who is sitting kinda quietly by the door to his hutch (and I should note that all the hutch doors are closely and securely latched) and he's got something dark stuck to the thick fur around his neck ruff.  I reach in and pick him up and there is blood all over his front legs and under his belly.  So much so, that I can't really tell where its coming from.  I get him onto a towel and into the bunny travel case I've got.  I look into his hutch, because really - how the hell.....and there is something dark lurking in the hay that's fallen into the droppings pan beneath his hutch.

I tear into the house to get some heavy leather gloves - and D - who luckily was home and drinking his coffee.  I haul all the other bunnies out and into their travel cages.  Ostara has a little bit of blood on her paws, but no active bleeding that I can see. 

The thing in the cage moves again and I can see 2 beady eyes. At first, we thought it was a ferret, but it was a wild (or mostly wild - there was a domesticated mink farm near here a few years ago) mink.  We got two pieces of metal strips and duct taped them to the one opening the mink could get through in the 3-inch high space underneath the hutch, where the pan is.

I got the buns in the house, checked Pippin and Ostara over.  Pippin was fine - he apparently just lost some hair.  Ostara had 2 paws cut, but I cleaned those and sprayed Bactine on them.  D got them settled while I whisked Newman off to the exotic pet/animal ER.  They had to clip a lot of hair off just to figure out how badly he was hurt - and it was pretty bad.  He had one back toe that had the toenail chewed off and opened up pretty badly - that just got one suture to close it.  The front paws were a mess.  He has lost all his toes on both feet - the flesh is gone down to the bone, and the vet had to do a flap closure with sutures for all of those.

He's home now, though, and resting with pressure bandages on in a big dog crate in the garage (where all the bunnies are until I can completely firebomb the wire of the outdoor hutches).  He's got a minimum of 2 weeks (and more likely a month or 2) of injectable penicillin for an antibiotic and a big vial of pain medications.  He did drink some water and ate some Cheerios when we got home tho, which is a good sign.  The vet was frankly surprised at his condition.  Newman was a little shocky when I got him into the hospital, but once they got the worst of the bleeders shut down, he rebounded pretty well.  Heart and respiration sounds were good, only a little elevated when we left after 2 hours.

When I got home, Animal Control was here.  The officer kept saying "what the hell IS that?" as she was trying to get the mink into the animal cage.  She and D managed to safely get the mink out from the hutch dropping pan and into the animal cage.  It is going in to be put down this afternoon and then tested for rabies.  We should have results sometime on Monday, and hopefully this will be negative, since D and I would both have to get treated because of the amount of blood, and the bunnies would likely all have to be put down as well because I can't be sure they weren't all infected (obviously Newman and Ostara who got bitten, but I have no idea if the other 3 boys were exposed or not).

Here's the perpetrator:

Assuming no nasty cooties, Newman's still got a long recovery ahead.  His pressure bandages on his front feet come off tomorrow and we have daily wound cleanings to do.  I need to keep all the fur on his feet clipped as best I can, to keep it from laying over the suture lines.  He has a checkup in a week to be sure the vet doesn't need to clean off any dead tissue, and Newman gets lots of head scratches and "good boy!" praises for being such a brave little man.

All for now......

P is for.....

Pippin.  He's the smallest of my bunny boys - and somewhat ironic that I named him something small when he was younger, because you certainly wouldn't have known at 8 weeks that he would be small.  He is nothing but fur.  When you pick him up, you practically wind up dumping him on the floor as you are expecting more solid weight.  He's Newman's great-nephew and he has the same lovely gray fiber.

Pippin also is the timidest of my bunnies.  It takes him a long time to relax when he's being sheared.  He never falls asleep while I'm brushing him, the way Bil does.  But like all the buns, he's a bit of a character.

The first summer I had the boys, we had a very warm snap in late May up in Vermont (like it was 65 one day, and 85 the next).  I had found a set of small plastic "snack"-sized containers (long enough for a stack of carrot sticks) and had frozen water in those overnight.  The next day, when temps were back into the mid to high 80s, I took those out for the boys to lay against to help cool them down.  Whenever Pip is trying to figure something out, he will duck his head a bit and look at the object as if he has on reading glasses.  He sat and pondered that frozen block for several minutes, and then, as if shot from a cannon, launched himself on top of it.  He began having um......intimate relations....with the container, until I guess the cold from the ice finally penetrated through the insulating layer of his angora fur.  His face changed, he stopped the gyrations, and leapt off the ice as if he had been burned.

Hm....some cautious sniffing and he was back on top of the ice for some more "quality time", and then another leap off.  This went on for probably 35 minutes while I laughed so hard I could barely move.  On his final leap off his frigid partner, he gave the ice block a final poke with his nose and retreated sullenly to a corner of his hutch, where he lay panting from the exertion of the previous half-hour.  He turned his back on the ice and refused to "speak" to it for the rest of the day.  He never would go near any other frozen objects I put in his hutch, and I always wonder what he thought of the whole thing.

All for now.....