File :-(, x, )
Anonymous
Short question: Ever nurse a pet back from the brink against the odds?

Long story: I was recently sick with a lot of time to rest and it brought back a bizarre memory from my childhood. Back when shelters were not more than chain link fences and small animal vets did not exist (where I grew up there was only one ignorant ham-handed livestock vet), my parents let me adopt a white mutt with blue eyes. He had to live outdoors (and on a chain when I wasn't around), but I was outside a lot at that age and we had the typical storybook kid/dog bond.

Several months later, I got off of the bus (I always came to see him before going inside) and he was having seizures. I said his name and grabbed him and he stopped, wheezed a bit, and then laid there. From then on, he was in a constant stupor, and seemed to be in a confused state. He was frightened of strange things, like his food/water bowls. Once or twice he would growl at me until I said his name, and then his eyes would show a slight hint of recognition, and he would go back to being dull and lifeless. Everyone said it was rabies, but I was a dumb stubborn kid and wouldn't let him die, so my mother taught me how to give him penicillin shots in the morning, and I would feed him water thru a syringe tube. At night I would shove him in his doghouse but he always flopped himself back out at night. I didn't even have to chain him anymore and I was already mourning him. Three weeks later, he began to weakly wag his tail at me one morning, and then he improved quickly after that. He lived a very long, healthy life after that.

In b4 "doggy acid trip" or "AIDS"
>> Anonymous
Any poisonous animals in your area?

I had to rescue my 14 year old cat from Kidney Failure, It was recommended that she be put down. She's still with me today, three years later.
>> Anonymous
>>212642

He may have had a run-in with a toad, or even just distemper, with him being an outdoor dog and it being so long ago, I don't expect to ever know.

Damn, your kitty's old, glad she's doing well after such a horrible diagnosis.
>> Anonymous
     File :-(, x)
When I was in 7th grade me and my friend were biking home, when we saw a mag-pie just standing there, looking dead, being verbally abused by a willy-wag-tail (they're tiny, but if anything comes near their nest they get nasty!)

I quickly biked home and told my mum. she drove us to the magpie and we picked it up with a towel and liad it on my lap. He was dying, closing his eyes, not moving. My mum told me he probably got hit by a car or something, since his wing and beak were injured (theres no way a will-wag-tail could do that)

We got home, he was almost dead. Mum got a syringe of water and put it in his mouth, all of a sudden he flew out of her arms, his "bad wing" miracously healed. and we flew away.
>> Anonymous
>>212739
HE flew away I mean. whoops.
>> Anonymous
... This thread makes me happy, despite the fact I'm usually emotionless in the way only a 4channer could be.
>> Anonymous
>>212640

My dog, a tiny mutt puppy, fell off a two-storey balcony on an extremely hot day, and fell straight down to the concrete and was left there in the heat all day.

Turns out mum got annoyed with the fact that he followed me around everywhere, and locked him out on the verandah thinking that the dog can't possibly be so stupid as to jump off, except he did to try and follow me.

When I saw his limp body lying in his own refuse in the evening, I literally had thought he was dead. I took him to my room, and fed him water with a syringe, got him several ice packs, tried to cool him down in the middle of the heatwave. I called in a vet who said she could only give him a strong painkiller, and given he was so young and it being the middle of a heatwave, she recommended I put him down. I refused.

Three days later, it looked like he was getting worse and worse, so in the end I chickened out. I couldn't bear to see him die. I left him in a basket on the floor of my bedroom, wrapped in tea towels and ice packs, and walked out to the living room.

I don't know why, but a while later, I took a look at the entrance of the living room, and saw my puppy slowly dragging himself into the living room. He was "standing" at a literal 45 degree angle, and he could only twitch his tail, but he made it before collapsing in my lap. And to think I abandoned him at the last minute.

To get to the living room from my room, he would have had to push the door open, and walk through two corridors and a sitting room.

... He made a full recovery after that, and still follows me everywhere. Even though I'm such a terrible owner.
>> Anonymous
My dad's friend gave me 21 redcap oranda goldfishes. They we're an inch big with they're tails excluded. Then I noticed one of the baby fishes had an under developed eye and an underdeveloped gill. Maybe something note worthy may happen later on?

inb4 " your fish is gonna die "
>> Anonymous
>>212756

Fucking loyalty. This is why I love dogs.
>> Anonymous
When I was a kid we had these Mexican neighbors. Most of the time they were cool people, I was friends with their kids, but whenever the dad would show up from wherever he'd been for months things would go straight to shit at their house.

He was a drunken asshole, and was always doing stupid shit and beating his family up. One day I was out playing with my brother and I saw him shoot this mourning dove. He didn't even go to retrieve it, he just shot it for no reason.

I spent an hour looking for it around where it fell before I finally found it huddled in a bush. I took it home and put in the cage I had used to nurse a pidgeon back to health previously, but the bars were too wide and he'd often get out, so I had to keep the door to my room closed.

I thought for sure he was going to die, because the bullet wound looked like it went straight through vital areas, and it was such a small bird. But after a few days of me taking care of it it seemed perfectly fine, and the wound had closed up. So I let it go and it flew off like nothing had happened.

I still can't figure out how it survived and recovered so quickly.

Also,>>212756made me ;_;
>> Anonymous
Sun set coner.. broke its wings and limped to our back porch. we have had birds for years and were just setting up a cage to breed two of them. I was young at the time so I dont know what my parents did but they gave him the cage. and if I were a bird, they gave him the bestest food. he was able to fly in less than a month, we dont know if it were broken or if it were just injured. he dies 3 years ago from age we suppose but I still remember how he would fly into the water facet. We called him Dude.

Hippi bird
>> Anonymous
Once when I was little I found my cat mauling a baby bunny. Horrified, I took the poor thing inside and stuck it in a box with some grass. I fed it with a rubber glove filled with milk. I went to sleep, and when I woke up, it was gone. My mom told me it got better and she set it free.

...It occurred to me many years later that this was a lie. That bitch is dead.
>> Anonymous
>>212756
T.T
>> Anonymous
When I was a child my mother had brought home a puppy from the rescue center named Barney; he was a mutt if there ever was one, a bird dog of some kind, mostly leg and paw at this point. He was a sweetheart, and it turns out he had distemper. Of course, putting down was recommended. My mother had just done this with the previous dog, and was devastated. Barney had stopped eating and was wasting away fast, but one morning showed interest in the sweetroll she was eating, she had already been syringing him water and some type of meds, but he actually ate the whole thing. Well, she went to safeway and bought several packs, and continued to feed him these sugary masses. Eventually he recovered and lived 15 years as the most bizarre loving dog we ever had.
>> Anonymous
>>213568
You're a pussy.
>> Anonymous
>>213568
I remember a cat I had that would maul baby bunnies. She taught me so many things: bunnies do indeed make a a noise, and you can stay alive for a while after being disemboweled.
It's OK, because the cat was softer than a baby bunny. I think she stole their powers.
>> KZN
This thread makes me ;_;

Anyways, this isn't much of a feat, but when I was around 9-10 years old, me and some kids from my old neighborhood found a baby bunny in our lawn by our swingset.

It was bleeding near it's head/neck and it kept thrashing around like it was in pain. We took it in and fed it water with a little syringe. One of the other kid's moms called animal services and found out a place we could drop off the bunny. After we gave it to them they called after a few weeks and said they'd released it.

I know I've got other stories, but I can't remember much right now. (They were all from a long time ago.)
>> Anonymous
>>213654
My cat Ace loved playing with things till they were dead. Slow, painful, death.

I was on the computer when I heard screaming outside, like a little girl screaming. Apparently it was a baby bunny Ace had been playing with. He would let it go, let it hop a little then catch it and puncture it. When I went to retrieve the bunny half of its skin had been peeled off and it was shaking.

Good times. No, it died.
>> Anonymous
My bichir had hemorrhagic septicemia so bad that he had bloody-looking streaks all over his scales and his eyeballs were red and popping out. I swear he looked like a fucking harlequin fetus. He was so weak he couldn't get up to take a gulp of air at the surface, so I kept him in a very shallow tank. He didn't eat for two weeks, and I was changing the water out daily. Basically, he just laid there, looking like a burn victim, eyes all popping out all over the place, getting thinner and thinner. But, closely monitoring the water, occasionally tilting his head up with the back of a net so he could get air, and a strange concoction of medications eventually, somehow, reversed everything. I finally got him to eat by feeding him whole fish, and, 4 years later, he's still fine. I thought he'd at least lose an eye from the whole ordeal (if he even survived), but both are normal now and function normally.
>> Anonymous
>>213771
I also adopted a kitten who was perfectly healthy when I picked her out. The shelter wanted to keep her to spay her, which was okay with me, but when I went to pick her up she didn't even look like the same animal. She was skinny, ears full of black shit, oozing from her eyes, nose, and mouth, and her butt was all diarrhea'd and ugh. The spay surgery at such a young age supposedly compromised her immune system, and she caught EVERYTHING floating around the overcrowded shelter.

Every time she shook her head, black gunk with blood in it flew everywhere. She was drooling because she had to breathe through her mouth because her mucus-y nose was so plugged. Every time she used to the litter, it smelled like concentrated death because she had worms, and I had to throw out all of its contents. Ever have a kitten rub on your leg and leave something wet and stinky behind? Yeah.

Fleas, worms, severe ear mites, upper respiratory infection... basically, yeah, everything. She'd just sit there and weeze, eyes gunked shut, drooling and too tired to move sometimes. The amount of medication I was making her take was awful, because anyone with cats knows how impossible it is to get them to take pills (much less several pills, several times a day, plus swabbing out+putting ear drops in horribly infected ears, plus liquid medication).

In short, she cost $1,000+ in vet bills within the first few months. Classic "if you can't afford the vet, you can't afford the pet" story. She grew up to hate me, presumably because of all the syringes I crammed down her throat.
>> Allergic to Cats Anon
We were checking the heifers after a stormy night with thunder, any young cattle is prone to spook in this kind of weather.

We found the heifer Nissa tangled in a fence suffering Hypothermia. As she was down a slope we had to drag her up a bank and onto a trailer to take her home for TLC.

After shots and the once over by the vets we had her in a calf pen at night and put her on a barrow and out onto the lawn by day.

She would not get up but seemed bright.

A few days later we had her tipped over to get circulation through her legs and noticed a sore behind her knee that had pus in it.

I got there and cleaned it out, the infection had taken 1/4 of the tissue that should have been there. The sharefarmer wanted her straight on the knackery truck as he said shes a hopeless case but I said no.

She still wouldn't stand up but I washed the gaping wound for a few mornings then started using a antiseptic spray that stopped the wound scabbing and cracking but also discouraged further infection.

After a week of more TLC on her leg I went to spray it again and she had a go at standing, a bit of quick thinking had me with my arms around her supporting her to stand until she stopped swaying.

She was hungry so I filled her with as much grass and hay as possible. She got up the next day on her own.

To get her back onto pasture I tethered her on the lawn where she stayed for two weeks getting moved to a new patch every two days.

Her leg made a full recovery which i was thrilled over as injuries like that can mean bits of pus can get into the small veins in the joints and give them "joint ill"

Needless to say we were all happy about not putting her on the knacker truck after all