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Before working at PetSmart, I really did not like 2 animals.... rats and snakes. But after a couple weeks of working there I fell in love with them, and they are now some of my favorite animals. So I eventually got some pet rats, but my mom said she drew the line with snakes. As much as I have wanted some that have come through the store I haven't bought any. We have had this snake called a Sand Boa for the past 4 or 5 months and I fell in love with him. He is one of the coolest, cutest snakes I have come across. Since we have had him I have wanted to get him but knew I wouldn't be allowed to bring him home, but the more I handled him and got him out to show people I realized how awesome of a snake this guy is..... Well you probably can see where this is going....

One day I went to work and went to put the snakes that already ate away... And there he was, and as I was putting him away I couldn't resist not to get him. I decided it was meant to be because he wasn't scheduled to eat that day and if I hadn't have to put him away I wouldn't have been so tempted. My manages found out I was thinking about getting him and when I talked myself out.... they talked me into it...And they had some very good, legit reasons.... So I did it with my moms words echoing in my head "don't ask...don't tell"

 

I bought him and brought him home that night, without letting my parents find out... My plan was to just keep him a secret, after all it was in my room and he wouldn't be able to escape his cage even if he did try. The great thing about sand boas is they aren't much of a climber, rather a burrower in sand so he can't reach the lid where I have cage clips to keep the lid from being pushed up. But the next morning I freaked out and felt so guilty I had to tell my mom..... Yes she did freak out a bit, but not as much as I thought.. and she still says I have to get rid of it, even though its been a week, but this snake is legit and I am going to keep it, even if it means keeping him somewhere else. I wake up in the mornings and his little head is poking out of the sand at me. My friend Hutch and I having been trying to think of names for this little guy.... We are between Steve and Alex, but if you have any great names that will fit him just let me know.

Sand Boa

So he is legit. Just a few facts:

•  This snake species is found in semi-arid desert regions, scrub savannahs, and rock
  outcroppings of East Africa; Egypt south to Tanzania; southwest Somalia west to Kenya.
•  Females are generally larger than males, weighing up to 2 pounds. Female length: 26-32 inches; Male length: 15 inches - - - I believe mine is a male because he is about 12 inches right now so he could get a little bigger
• The Kenyan sand boa spends most of its life buried in the sand, quite invisible. It also lives hidden under stones and in the burrows of other animals.
• They are Ovoviviparous, which means although the babies develop inside eggs within the mother, they will be born live.
• Sand boas are some of the smallest boa species on Earth.
• The eyes and nostrils of the sand boa are on the top of the head so they can breath and search the surface for prey while the rest of their body lies hidden beneath the sand.

Bye Bye Birdie... I'm gonna miss you so

After I woke up the other morning I was making my way out of my room into my bathroom when this blob of something caught my eye right by the baseboard of the door...there lay a little juvenile hummingbird. Looking at it I thought it was dead...

Eyes closed

Bundled up

Not moving... couldn't see that it was breathing

No reaction to me coming out and walking right next to it.

So I got something and gently touched it because I didn't want to scare it too bad if it was alive.

Poor little guy slowly opened his eyes and started to breathe a little hard. He had been in that room all night and just exhausted from trying to find his way out. So I gently wrap him up in a towel and took him upstairs, but because he was so weak I knew he needed to eat first before he was released. So my mother and I got nectar or sugar water and fed him from a syringe. First he was hesitant at eating but got better and better. We went outside to let him free and. . . .  poor thing... tried to fly away but had missing feathers and still was weak that he flew a few feet and fell to the ground... This happened a few more times and decided that we'd just have to help him. We tried putting him on the hummingbird feeder and the poor guy just sat there.... until a mean big one came and knocked him off tumbling him to the ground.

So we took him inside and kept him in a little container. We first kept feeding him every few minutes, and then every 30 minutes throughout the day... He started to become more alert and getting strength back but because he had missing feathers he wouldn't be able to fly until they grew back in. So we called up the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center of Northern Utah in Ogden. We took him in where he was going to have a new family of 5 other hummingbirds that were there to be taken care of until their release back into the wild. 

They are a wonderful non-profit organization to help sick or injured wildlife get ready back on their feet to be released back into the wild. They "through wildlife rehabilitation and education will empower the community to engage in conservation and responsible stewardship of wildlife and habitat." Like them on Facebook and check out their website at www.wrenu.org and check on our little hummingbird. His animal case # 1105 and you can follow his rehab process.

Here are a few pictures of the little guy:

Sitting on the hummingbird feeder

As he sat there some other hummingbirds came by to eat

And some came to chase others away

 

 

Feeding

 

“Man believes he must manage the wilderness for the wilderness’ sake. Wilderness: a perfect example of eons of successful self-management and yet man shall “manage” it to death.”
~Buz Marthaler~

Read more: Wildlife Rehabilitation Center of Northern Utah

Back To School

"Back to school. Back to school, to prove to Dad that I'm not a fool. I got my lunch packed up, my boots tied tight, I hope I don't get in a fight. Ohhhh, back to school. Back to school. Back to school. Well, here goes nothing." - Billy Madison

Well its another quarter in the life of a Broadview University student, and that means new classes. I had a decent 3 week break from school... definitely not long enough and i wish that break included a break from work as well. But it was nice not to have to worry about studying and homework and waking up early.

My first class I am taking is Basic Hematology. Blood and lots of it. Fortunately last week I got a heads up on veins with my practice on shooting a drug into the jugular vein of a horse.... My friend Hutch told me he needs me to be his vet from now on... so he taught me how to find the vein and inject it. Only thing is we had to make sure we didn't hit an artery or it would really mess the horse up, so I was kind of freaked out because I didn't know the difference between a vein and an artery. Well after the first day of school I found out, you'd have to be really really bad at injecting and practically at a 90 degree angle deep into the animal to hit the artery, and arteries have bright blood and keeps pumping. Veins are closer to the surface, hit it at a 30 degree angle, and has darker blood. Fortunately I hit the vein and the horse slowly dozed off so he could get his feet trimmed. Hitting it wasn't as hard as I thought. Since this class is basic hematology I will be doing a lot of blood draws from the cephalic and saphenous veins from dogs and cats and learn all the components of bloods, smears, slides, etc....

Adult ascarids in the small intestine of a horse

My next class is Parasitology.... Ticks, lice, fleas, tapeworm, heart-worm, giardia, bots, flukes, nematodes... you get the idea. We learn all about the different types and how to do tests. This includes dealing with blood, urine, skin, hair, and my favorite... poop. Poop smears, fecal floats, poop soup... its going to be grand. This will probably one of my more harder classes this quarter, just because there is a lot of information to cover and remember. Everyone, including my teacher, says this class is one of the more harder ones just because of all the information to study.

My third class is Lab Animals, Pocket Pets, and Exotics. I am pretty excited for this class. We will get to cover all the animals excluding dogs/cats/large/production. So this means: rats, mice, rabbits, guinea pigs, hedge hogs, sugar gliders, birds, reptiles.... and so on. It will be fun, especially working at PetSmart I work with a lot of the animals in this category.

After 11 weeks I'll be done with this classes, have a week break and move on to my next set of vet tech classes. So far the program has been great, learning lots, and its definitely something that is for me. So until next time....

Lions, Tigers, and Bears!

Last week we had the chance to take my 17 month old niece Paisley to Hogle Zoo in Salt Lake. Pretty sure I enjoyed the zoo more than her cause I do have this little addiction with animals, but she liked seeing all the different types of animals there. I hadn't been there since I was 11, so it was a great experience now that I'm older and so many changes have been made. They had some pretty amazing animals there and I learned quite a few things, such as a giraffe's tongue is 18 inches long. That is a long tongue and one giraffe was just licking the side of the building so we got to see actually how long it really is. Also that tiger stripes and giraffe prints are like human finger prints, not one is ever the same.

White Glove Monkey

Watching the monkeys were very entertaining. I was just impressed how they can swing and climb through their habitats like its nothing. It looked a lot of fun with their long arms, their feet being used just like their hands, and then there tails wrapping around anything helping them hang on and move from branch to branch. The Spider Monkeys were probably the most entertaining ones swinging around.

The Columbus Monkeys were way adorable. They had really interesting coat that were black with long white hair that lied off of their sides as shown in these 2 pictures. And just look at that adorable face!!

 

Because elephants are my favorite animal I just absolutely loved seeing them, especially seeing baby Zuri there. She is going to be 2 years old this august and she sure is the cutest little thing.  They are quite an amazing animal. I think it would be way cool to be able to ride one, and it would be even cooler to have one as a pet but I would not enjoy having to feed it knowing how much they eat. One thing I did learn that day was their trunks can be over 300 pounds, no bones but with over 40,000 muscles! That is insane, more than we have in our body. It is a very important body part to their being and survival.

Elephants have been my favorite animal since the 2nd grade when I did a report on them. At the zoo that day they were fun to watch. How they moved, used their trunk for the water to spray on them or to throw dirt over their backs, how they use it like a vacuum to pick up leaves and grasses off the ground, and how baby Zuri is shown love from her mother. It was a hot day so Zuri sure did enjoy getting in the water to cool off.

One of my other favorite parts of that day was this guy. He sure has a big personality and loved  to show for all the kids.... including myself. At first he was just basking away in the sunshine and once he realizes he has a crowed waiting for him he gets up and dives into the water and puts on a very thrilling show. He swims up to the glass, pops up, poses for the camera and pushes off swimming on his back until he gets to his rock a few yards from the glass window. He stands up on it, and then dives back under, doing this routine for a good while. Pretty sure he could do it all day long and loved the attention. I watched him do it over and over for the longest time, and when we walked by later he was still at it, putting big smiles on everyone's faces. He is a character.

We did take a nice little train ride around a few habitats to see some animals you can't get to see from the normal walkways. It was a fun little train, kind of reminded me like the one at lagoon, except not as cool. Here is our exciting zoo day tour. Jess, Nick, Paisley, Mama, and I.

 It was an eventful day and I had a blast. Everyone had fun but I think it did wear out this little girl just a tad bit.....

INFECTED!

Well, its been a couple of months, and I'm proud to say I survived the infection of ringworm. Ringworm is a fungus skin infection and has nothing to do with a worm. Its name is often a description of the infection in that red patches are often redder around the outside with normal skin tone in the center, in that it starts healing from the inside out and looks like a ring. Ringworm can be itchy, red, raised, scaly patches that may blister and ooze. It can also make you loose your hair. Fortunately mine was in the inside of my arm.

Ringworm is supposed to be very contageous.... I have no idea where I got it or who I got it from. I didn't see it on any animals at work, school or any of mine at home, and no one I knew had it either. I also didn't pass it along to anyone else that I know of, but I was pretty careful in never touching/scratching it, and if I did so to wash my hands. For the first 2 weeks I had this small round path of really dry skin on my inner arm.... I didn't know exactly what it was, but just thought I had a random patch of very dry skin.... After 2 weeks of that, one day I noticed another ring around this patch of skin and I immediately thought of ringworm. Great thing about being in animal medicine is that a lot of it just goes hand in hand with humans as well. So at school I asked my teacher. He decided to do a test. He took me into a dark room with a black light and placed it over the area... and shore enough, I was diagnosed with ringworm. When ringworm is placed under a black light it lets off a nice flouresecent green glow, and thats exactly what mine did. A couple days later I did the test again and it was glowing even more.... and it eventually got bigger and redder, and the middle started healing but the outter ring was spreading. My teacher at school made me a bandage to wrap it for when I was handling with the dogs... He placed it around my arm and in big black letters said: "Do Not Touch. I'm Infected"

Well... everyone kept telling me to go to the doctor... And I hate doctors, and I couldn't see any reason to go. I diagnosed myself, and I knew what I needed to get rid of it... an antifungal cream. So I went to Wal-Mart and found 2... One for athletes foot, and one for jock itch.... I couldn't decide between the two, since they were pretty much the same, but the jock itch said extra strength, so I went with that... I applied that on it a lot... and it slowly got better. However another student gave me teatry oil cause she swore that works, so I applied some of that. Yet, pretty sure I found the real cure...

Its a fact that if you pee in the shower, it prevents athletes foot. Athletes foot is a fungal infection as well as ringworm, and antifungal creams treat both atheletes foot and ringworm, therfore urine prevents and treats ringworm.... That was the fastest cure.

 This was a couple day after the outer ring began appear (after the first 2 weeks of the center patch of dry skin). The infection then got a litte wider, redder and more raised as the center dry patch healed. It did look pretty bad. For the most part the whole thing is gone, except a faint ring mark.... So I am keeping up with my cure aids to help finish getting rid of it. My classmates named it Hank, and that it was going to turn into the Hulk because it was exposed to radiation from taking radiographs. I did have a dream, however, that I did have a big patch of ringworm right on my forehead. . .  That would have been awful. Hank wasn't too much of a bother to me.... In fact, I'm starting to miss him. He was always there for me and we did do everything together. We showered together, slept together, we even went shopping together and he never did complain about anything.