Chris & Joy’s Critterweb

We had originally planned on dressing all the animals up and getting them into a picture together but didn’t quite get that off the ground. We did get a few pics of Simon, Olive, Lindsy and Mojo in costume, though. And a few of Lauren the blob.

As we had decided last week after the awful nightmare with Willow’s death, we had Luna put to sleep on Saturday. All of last week we gave her whatever she wanted to eat but it was pretty clear she’d lost her spirit and was ready to go. She was one of the most amazing rats we ever had the pleasure of knowing and we will sure miss her.

It happened so suddenly and in such an awful way it doesn’t seem real…

She hasn’t been doing well for some time now. She’s had that lung crud some rats get because of the mycoplasma they carry, and though we’ve been able to hold it in check a bit with antibiotics, her weight and her appetite have steadily declined. We talked this past week about her quality of life, and decided it was time to let her go. In truth, we’d probably put it off a little too long. She’d gotten thin and didn’t care to eat much other than Nutrical.

The past few days she’d been doing about the same as she’d had for a while, but was actually eating pretty well. I discovered last week that the rats love tofu, and had held some back from our last stir fry to dole out as snacks. I also gave them some almonds and cashews on Friday which Willow surprisingly gobbled up. Saturday she looked a little rougher than usual and as we’d already discussed, we decided to take her in to the vet and get it over with. We called the vet and then made preparations to load her into a carrier to take her.

When we went back to get her out of the cage she and Lauren shared, she was in obvious distress and running around the cage frantically. We’d never seen her do this before and I have no idea what brought about this sudden change. We hastily hurried to get her to the vet. On the way there, she suddenly started acting like she could not breathe at all, and while Joy drove, I helplessly watched her thrash around and suffocate, finally collapsing. I stroked her fur as she faded away. It was one of the most terrible things I have ever witnessed. I have no idea what happened so suddenly, and it pains us both to think that maybe she came to such an awful end because we were so reluctant to put her to sleep.

Luna, unfortunately, is not far behind. She still is eating and the tumors are not obstructing any body functions, but they have grown so huge she has trouble getting around now and one of them is beginning to get a raw spot where it drags. We don’t want to make the same mistake with her and we’re going to make arrangements next week to see to it that she goes on to the peaceful end she deserves.

I know I have said this dozens of time over the past two decades or so, but this time I really mean it: NO MORE RATS. With my allergies, I have no business having them since I can have only minimal contact with them, but that’s not the main reason; it is their fleetingly short little lives that I can’t cope with. It’s not fair that creatures so gentle and playful and intelligent live just long enough to work their way into your heart before they break it. Soon there will be just Lauren, who is fat and sassy and only about a year old. We’ll spoil her rotten and enjoy her, then once she is gone that will be it, she will truly be the last one.

Poor Willow. At least she is at peace now.

Willow
??/02 - 04/24/04

Lauren the brat visiting Luna. The large lump that can be seen behind Luna’s arm is one of her two tumors.

We’ve had a lot of things going on the past week or so and posts to this weblog will probably be few and far between for the next few weeks. Wednesday came home last Monday and is doing great. Mojo was very sick that same day and had to be rushed to the vet with extreme diarrhea and vomiting, but he is feeling a lot better now too. We had a urinalysis done on Lilly and found out she has a raging urinary tract infection and possibly some kidney issues; after she finishes her three weeks of antibiotics she is going back for another urinalysis, this time with an additional urinary protein:creatinine (UPC) ratio test to check her kidney function. Luna’s tumor, sadly, continues to grow by leaps and bounds and she has two more inside her back legs. She’s still feeling pretty good and we are supplementing her with Nutrical (which she loves) but it’s only a matter of time before the cancer starts to weaken her.

Big news is that we have been house-hunting for the past week and decided for sure to move. After the property inspection we got a new lease in the mail to sign, and we just didn’t want to be committed to another year here. In many ways the house is wonderful and we agonized over this decision, but in the end we decided that if we could find a place with cheaper rent and a better yard we would not sign the lease. I don’t want to jinx things here, as the lease is still pending on the new house, but as soon as it’s a ‘done deal’ I will post some pictures. We will both be closer to our jobs, the rent is a lot cheaper, the house is bright and airy and very charming. The yard is wonderful. On the downside, the house is even smaller than the one we are in now and we will no longer have a garage. But I think overall it is for the best. We’ll also be real close to white rock lake park - walking distance - which will be great for the dogs.

Ugh, I hate the thought of packing and moving again, though; I really hope this will be the last one for a long time!

A few months back one of our neighbors had a yard sale, and we saw that they had a used 15 gallon aquarium with a screen top for sale. We figured we could always use a spare cage and I think we paid maybe five bucks for it. Not having any particular use for it right at that moment, the tank just sat in the garage until a few weeks ago when we decided to move Willow and Lauren to the bookshelf in the office. The cage they were in wouldn’t fit on the shelf so we put them in the aquarium.

Joy cleaned the tank up with hot water and some sort of cleaner like pine sol and the rats were soon situated in their new digs. Within about a week, Lauren had broken out all over her neck with horrible itchy scabs and was tearing herself bloody. Off to the vet we went. We suspected mites, like Luna had once had, but he could not find any with a magnifying lense. He did a skin scraping and came back a few minutes later saying “well I’m glad we did the scrape” and then announced that Lauren had sarcoptic mange, better known as scabies. There was a hurried flurry of handwashing, as this is the type of mange that is highly contagious to other animals — and humans!

He asked about anthing new in their environment, and we mentioned the aquarium; he confirmed that this is a pretty common scenario for getting something like this. Apparently the little monsters can also survive a pretty long time in the environment and they must have been in some crack or under the loose caulking and made it past the cleaning that way. Poor Lauren and Willow.

All 3 rats (Luna’s cage is near those, so we did her too, just to be safe) had to be treated with Revolution; the vet felt one treatment should take care of it so at least it was fairly easy to fix, and didn’t require the poor little girls getting any injections. Because they are not quite as friendly as Luna is and don’t get handled a lot, it doesn’t seem we spread it to ourselves or the other critters. We were lucky. Our cheap aquarium ended up costing us over $80 — and ended up in the trash!

The posts have been a little sparse lately, because there has been a lot going on. Nothing earthshatteringly catastrophic, at least…

One reason for the lack of updates is that I have decided to buckle down and study, and try to be ready for my CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Associate) exam before the end of the year. I don’t know if I will be able to pull it off that quick because subnetting still makes me go all glaze-eyed and blank (it’s math, after all) but I’m giving it my best shot.

Another reason is that we are having some issues with Tori. Well, it’s not that this is anything new but we’d hoped we’d be able to get a handle on it by now. The ‘Retriever mix’ puppy we adopted is apparently actually a closer to full grown Border Collie/Australian Shepherd mix — essentially a busy herding dog with a high prey drive. We have tried everything we can think of to get her to stop chasing and nipping at the cats. We are also not able to meet her activity needs very well, but the big issue is the cat chasing/biting. Our youngest cat Simon has had a femoral head ostectomy on both hips, which means, essentially, that he has no hip joints. He cannot run or defend himself. We watch Tori as vigilantly as we can but if our attention wanders even for a second she is after the cats, and Friday night she hurt Simon, either by nipping or stomping on him. He is OK, thankfully, but it drove home what we’d already realized and just didn’t want to admit: ‘this isn’t going to work.’

The other problem with the Tori situation, ironically, is Mojo. I say ironically because one of the reasons we got her was so that he would have a pal to roughhouse with, but he is actually settling down considerably and likes to spend more quiet time now. Poor Tori has grown accustomed to nonstop wrestling and pesters him until he gets defensive because she can’t understand when he just wants to sit and chew a bone. It’s not a good situation for him because she gets him agitated and that starts him spinning.

It’s not her fault she has more energy than we can cope with, if anything it is our fault for not recognizing what she was when we got her. It’s really hard to gauge a dog’s breed and true temperament when adopting from a shelter, and of course her background was entirely unknown. In retrospect we should have gone with a dog that had been fostered for some time at a rescue group but hindsight is always 20/20, right? And in our defense, we couldn’t have forseen just how much of Mojo’s ‘busy-ness’ was apparently actually a side effect of his compulsive behavior that would stop as he got better.

So we are looking for a more suitable home for Tori now. I feel horrible that we are even considering this but at least she is out of the shelter, dewormed, crate trained, and has learned some basic obedience commands so she is better off than when we first got her, in that respect. And we know her well enough now to have a good idea of what sort of environment she needs to be happy. Hopefully we can find that perfect home for her.

Wednesday was very ill with diarrhea from an unknown cause recently and ended up at the vet’s. She’s feeling much better now and regaining some of the weight she lost. We think it was the food she was eating. We got her a new collar (tan with blue-green rhinestones) at the Cat Connection yesterday — she looks very sharp in it and I’m hoping to get a picture of her with it on.

Mojo, as I already mentioned, is doing well. We had a rough spot a week or so back when we had to decrease his medication because he was really zoned out, but he’s doing really good now on the lower dose. We still see tailwatching on a daily basis and maybe once or twice a day he will actually chase it, but he is easily distracted. We were told that he will need to be on the clomipramine at least 14-16 weeks and then we can taper it back off if things are under control. I will be very glad to get him back off it, but I do have to admit that it has really helped.

Luna-rat’s tumor continues to grow but she is in good spirits. It might be starting to affect her ability to use her right front leg. We’re watching her close on that, and spoiling her rotten. Joy found these yogurt covered banana chips that she and the other two rats go crazy over. Lilly has been having tummy troubles again and doesn’t seem to be feeling too well. She doesn’t do so good in cold weather and we are thinking of finding her some sort of heated dog bed to help her get through this winter.

That’s about it from here. It’s finally getting cold outside — it was near 80 yesterday and then a front came through early this morning and dropped it closer to 40. We’re trying to think of what to do for Thanksgiving this year; we’d had sort of a tradition going when we were in Tucson of spending it with our friends Chris and Paul, who were also vegetarians, and we haven’t really made many friends since we moved here. We thought maybe we might see if any of the (very few) vegetarian restaurants here are having a Thanksgiving buffet, and do that rather than putting all that work into cooking a giant meal here for just the two of us.