Mouse Guts!

Morning began with food prep  for the binturongs and kinks (on my own this time). A very sad thing happened this weekend... Carmelita, whose pool I cleaned on Friday, was doing much worse. On Friday she had been very lethargic, refusing to move for more than a few feet, and was bleeding and oozing. Yesterday the vet came out to look at her, and once she was tranquilized, they found that her cancer had begun to spread...She was very uncomfortable. I am not sure what other health issues they found, but I know they mentioned her respiration was off. The decision was made to euthanize her at that time, and upon her necropsy (animal autopsy), they found that the cancer had actually spread through her chest, into her longs and have even attacked a wall of her heart. She would probably not have survived or been comfortable even another week. Carmelita has always been a favorite of many volunteers, tour guides and workers, as she was a grunter, chuffer, talked and overall goofball. On Friday I had actually grabbed a picture of her, where despite her pain, she was rolling and tiger grunting at us:

She will be missed.

The rest of the morning I got a chance to do something I have not done before- clean enclosures. As I mentioned earlier, they have shiftable enclosures, and most of these are what are classified as Level 2's (small cats) or Level 4's (big cats). When you begin to clean cages, these are what you start with, as you are not actually going in with a cat, but are moving them out of the enclosure and then cleaning, looking for bones, dead animals, vomit, poop, loose/damaged platforms, holes/damage in the fence, that sort of thing. You also place enrichment in the enclosure. Normal enrichment for the small cats fits through the chain link holes or feeding shoots, but when you go in to clean you can put in big boxes, new structures, or other large objects which are quite fun for them. So I got to work with two long-term volunteers, Evan and Susie, and my favorite intern, Melanie.

After lunch, I was the only non-volunteer there, and only two volunteers came in, so it was a very quiet day. Lenore let me do something I quite enjoyed, which was to give all the animals their dewormer- Ivermectin. So I got to interact with almost all of the animals, injecting the dewormer into chicken for the Caracals, into mice bellies for the Servals and Ocelots, bananas for the binturongs, and into steak for the Tigers. Male tigers got the most dewormer (at 0.65 mL), Bint's got anything from .3-.5 mL, female tigers got .35 mL, and little cats got .05 mL- quite a difference between the species! As I went around, I tried to snap some good pictures of the animals, for, as Jared says, my blogs are really long and don't have enough pictures for the normal people out there!

Collins, the crazy bobcat (who is my favorite bobcat). The end of my stick has a mouse on it, and he is about to pounce!

Rajaji staring at me over the corner of his newly-cleaned pool.

Christian munching on a chicken carcass.

Renee, our 3-legged ocelot, and her cagemate Oliver, sharing a gentle moment.

Renee again.

Kizmet enjoying a drink.

Overall my day was really restful, which was great. I wore long sleeves all day to protect my poison, and that seemed to do well. It was really humid, but not incredibly hot, so this wasn't too uncomfortable. I stayed a little later than normal tonight, as I was talking with Ed about the ethics of hunting. See, since I was one of the only people there, and had more experience than both the volunteers in the afternoon, I got some more one-on-one time with the keepers. I DID actually see Ed smile, and learned that he really likes puns, as well as just has a quiet sense of humor about the animals... The other two keepers are vegan/vegetarian, but Ed actually hunts, tans his own hides, processes the skulls, and uses every bit of the animals- which is awesome. Lenore is in the process of opening her own rescue for food animals- she is very against the food processing industry, and wants to take in cattle, chickens, hogs, etc. that are past their "use" on farms and might just need some veterinary care rather than being put down as often happens. While I agree that this is a sad thing, I also don't think this is a reason to stop eating meat- in my family we hunt deer, get our meat from a local butcher shop (of whom  I personally know the butcher and their practices) or pick one out of the field of a local farm. Our pork is from kids 4-H projects, our eggs are from my own chickens. I have helped butcher a deer, watched a hog and a cow being butchered, seen an animal's last moments. I understand what I am taking, and the price that it comes at... and I value it. The animals that I consume have had a free life, or if not free, at least comfortable. Many have been loved and given excellent care. Personally, if I were one day eaten by an animal, I would consider it part of the food chain, and my place in the life cycle. It is just a different way of living than the average American, who do get their meat in impersonalized packages and don't think where it came from or what type of life it had.

 It is all shades really, the spectrum of life and the interactions of man and beast.

One of the things I was thinking about this morning and did not have the chance to express was the personal trip it took me to get down here... It was a very scary thing for me to take a gamble on this two-week adventure, to live on the couch of people I have never met, to drive 8 hours to get to a place I had only been once, to spend money (quite a lot for me, the thrifty/cheap money-hoarder) on food and gas which I will never get back, and to at times put my foot down to everyone else who was worried, all for an experience I might have hated. But I got lucky, and instead of telling myself that it was too much, too scary and unfamiliar, I made myself go through with it, pushed through the doubts and the uncertainties, and I have grown. More than just learning about the animals and people here or finding an interest I never knew I had in exotic animals, I have learned about myself and what I can do on my own. For the first time in a long time, I found courage, a sense of humor, responsibility, leadership skills, and confidence in greater quantities than I ever thought I had.

Take a gamble, you never know what you might learn about yourself in the process- good or bad.