It has been a wild week at work with all kinds of strange animals coming out to play.

  • I saw a snake for a checkup and to see if she had eggs. When we opened the lid to her container she decided that I was about the scariest person she had ever seen. She would look at me and then dive her head under her body to hide. Then she would peer out with one eye but if I looked directly at her she would dive back under her body again. It was sort of sweet. She was being shy but curious. The funny thing is that she seemed to truly believe she was invisible when her head was hidden.

    This wasn’t some little garter snake. (Thank god or I’d have been more scared of her than she was of me.) She was 13 feet long and weighed 97 pounds. Hiding her eyes definitely did not make the other 12.75 feet of her disappear! It took four people to handle her for a x-ray. I held her back end for the picture and everyone else supported the rest of her body off the table. She didn’t have any eggs. I got to feel how powerful she was when I was holding her tail (the least powerful part of her) down with two hands and she decided to leave. She pulled me along like I wasn’t even there. Good thing she was friendly.

  • We got a call about a young hawk that some kids were throwing rocks at. The receptionists went and got him during lunch. He didn’t seem hurt, just confused, so a tech took him to her house and released him. He flew off just fine.
  • I was taunted by a turtle yesterday. I wanted to work on her head. Usually they just pull their heads into their shells and won’t let you work. This one would pull her head in when I reached for her and then when I backed off she’d stretch it out as far as it would go and wiggle it at me. She was clearly mocking my feeble attempts to catch her head. I scheduled her for a drop-off day to be anesthetized to work on her head. That’ll learn her to make fun of her vet.
  • I worked on a fox yesterday. I’ve never done that before. She is an old pet fox. She was very sick and very subdued. She just sat there like a dog and let us work on her even up to pulling blood and checking her teeth.