Chrysocome

One of my classmates emailed me this. It's a sad, compassionate and strangely touching site. It's simply a list of euthanasias that this vet has had to do, day by day for three years. What I Killed Today A simple list, and yet I only got through a few entries before I started choking up. Going into the profession myself, it has instilled in me just what I will be facing. Perhaps I will be holding a record like this too. The site is no longer updated, but it still intrigues me. A very empathic and poetic resting place for many animals over the rainbow bridge.

Ugh. You sure that's hygienic? Sure glad I never have to eat my dissections Although all the big fat salmon we had to post mortem were mighty tempting.

I wish I had a video of that day we went to catch the feral cat and her kittens living under our uni (yes, under, and only a few of us were small enough to get down there). The other problem was.. it was the last day of ten exams and we were all pretty tired and a little bit tipsy from celebrating! We did manage to get all the kittens though, most of them are now beloved pets of the students.

I know - I saw it in the morning and was stunned at how big it was after uni!

Sorry Kaz, I agree with you, if it didn't sound like it. I am not against euthanasia of animals. However, I just don't see our society allowing the mass killing of healthy animals so I picked the next best option. If we can't euthanase them then sterilising them is better than doing nothing.

How is catching an animal and letting it go again sterilised any different to sitting back and doing nothing at all?

MB said it. People just won't allow mass killing of animals. Well, non-food ones anyway. The catch-spay-release method seems to work for street dogs in Asia and I think they are doing it up in North Aus? If you release it the niche is still filled so a fertile animal won't replace it.

Yeah MB, and that's quite important isn't it, it's also the reason why vet students won't be doing the spays - who is going to pay for drugs, machines, equipment, supervision (of both the student and the animal!), and then what do we do with them? Quite a dilemma. But I think if we sit back for much longer it's could get very much worse. bird_crazy, what is your opinion of the vast proportions of our land taken up by farming?

This reminds me about a vicious article against my uni a while back, confusing our non-survival surgery prac classes, our greyhound blood donors and our surgical anatomy (dissection classes). It was all mixed up and spat out a totally unethical (and completely wrong) image of the vet students being butchers, breeding and killing dogs en masse on campus. The worst part was that the article appeared balanced and never actually told a lie, just stated facts in a way that led you to believe these things. People who read it took at face value and even when they found out we did terminal surgeries (one per student in our entire five year course), decided to boycot any vet from Melbourne uni. Well, they might as well boycot all vets, and while they're at it, never eat meat, use animal products, any medicine or makeup or anything! But I digress. This leads me to another interesting discussion I have had with my classmates and lecturers. The population of pet cats in Australia is actually decreasing. But feral cats live on. What's going on? Is it because more cats are being released? Perhaps, but that's not just it. Part of the problem is that legislation and vets have been so efficient at educating owners and desexing cats that fewer and fewer pet cats are being born. While pet cats do contribute to the feral population, nothing is actually being done to stop the feral cats - they are the ones doing all the damage. The domestic cats get punished for it. It helps a bit, but is it enough? The feral cats keep breeding and breeding and our mutually exclusive set of domestic cats has stopped breeding. We might catch and rehome a very small number of feral cats sometimes, which means we are moving our gene pool towards selecting cats that are slightly wild and prone to behaviour problems. Which would lead to more being released. Not only that but legislation is starting to look at permanent cat curfew to stop interbreeding. Thing is, that would lead to increased incidence of cat behaviour problems too. The answer lies more in having a plan to stop the feral cats. The government punishes the pet cats and feels good, completely ignoring the wild ones. The problem continues. Why not a catch and spay operation to deal with the problem, instead of making our pet cats slowly more problematic as well? Just an interesting discussion that has been going on at vet school.

Thanks you guys.. My apologies for lack of updates, I'm backlogged a few weeks now, and Week 12 was an amazing week (anyone ever intubated a fish before?) - here's hoping I remember it all. I have just been swamped, absolutely swamped with cramming for exams. It's currently 2:50am and I'm still reading things I've only ever seen once/never seen before (why on earth did they give us lectures notes months after the lectures, which were given by replacement lecturers anyway so they had no idea what they were aiming to teach us?). I've never felt this bad about exams before... Gosh, I'm glad no one can see me.. I must look like a wreck.. I've been pulling off 2-3am nights for about two weeks, which I know is bad, but it's better knowing the gist of everything rather than every detail of a few things that might be on there (mostly numbers too.. I never remember those) - the non-essential stuff I can make up on the spot. This is/was my schedule: 9 exams for 4 subjects. -Monday 26th May: Equine practical exam; Pathology quiz 2 (Nervous and respiratory systems) (yes, two in a day) -Thursday 29th May: Bovine practical exam -Tuesday 10th June:-Body Sytems 1 written exam -Thursday 12th June:-Body Sytems 2 written exam -Friday 13th June:-BS1 and BS2 combined practical exam -Monday 16th June:-Clinical Medicine & Surgery written exam -Wednesday 18th June:-Animal Health and Management 3 written exam -Thursday 19th June:-Body Systems 2 oral exam -Friday 20th June:-Clinical Medicine & Surgery oral exam Only three more to go! Then I can sleep, for about half a day, before I head out west for two weeks on a mixed practice! Fun times

What insect? All I can see are plants! ... Awesome shot! I've never seen that before. Thanks for sharing!

It's confusing isnt' it? Megabacteria = Macrorhabdus ornithogaster = Avian Gastric Yeast. They're all the same thing but megabacteria seems to be what BBC people use. They called it megabacteria because it's purple and rod-shaped like a bacterium under the microscope... but it's actually a fungus so it's big, hence the name. Edit: Well, 'big' as in, much bigger than a bacterium.. but of course that's still pretty small!

Eyal, do you have a picture of your budgie right now? It might help us find out what is wrong. Does he have matted feathers on top of his head? Do you notice him regurgitating/vomiting? Does he scratch at his eye? I ask because I once saw a case where a lady brought in her bird thinking it had an eye infection. We did a crop flush and found Macrorhabda, a fungus, that was making him vomit. When birds vomit it goes into their mouth and they shake their head, so it ends up on their face. The vomit got in his eye and it was irritating him so he kept scratching at it. The scratching caused inflammation which caused more scratching and it went on like that. So Trich is a possibility as that makes them vomit too. Trich and Macrorhabda will not be affected by antibiotics. Your vet should do a crop flush and look at it under a microscope to find out if he has these. However, he might just not be eating because he feels sick.

Chirper is definitely a budgie. These are lineolated (barred) parakeets: Lineolated parakeets have different body structures - their bodies are rounder, their faces are shaped differently. They have big eyes, their ceres do not turn blue or brown, their beaks tend to be pink where budgies have orange. From what I see they have only one base colour that goes throughout their bodies (with black markings on top). They do not get barring around their eyes like a budgie can, nor do they get throat spots or the blue/white slash near their beaks. They also have short fat tails where budgies have long slender tails. Budgies: I think they're really cute - like a cross between a budgie and a lovebird Chirper looks different to your other budgies because she is a pied where they are normal. Recessive pieds tend to have less black markings, black eyes and more of the pale colour on their bodies (yellow or white, instead of green or blue). She reminds me of my Milly

*shakes head* A bird should never eat homework! On the contrary - one must help out! (Lol, Squee lets me get so close) Five minutes later... Wait, slow down, let me type it in... it's not like you're paying me to do this! Hmm... maybe if I carry the 1... Is that right? It doesn't look right. I'm so confused! Oh dear, let me right it down! How about I help you with P.E instead? :ygbudgie:

What?? How dare you accuse me! Look at this face! Is this the face of a naughty budgie?! Although admittedly homework is very tasty! Om nom nom! Uh.... Okay, so maybe I have a bit of an eating problem. So I guess I'l go on a diet! Tee hee! -Milly

Thanks (I'll need it!) and you too MB. Good luck to Sailorwolf too, and anyone else with exams these few weeks

I think the 'drafts' thing is confusing. What is really harmful to them is some room temperature with an extremely different temperature of air blowing on them, like warm air from a heater or really cold air from outside. I take all the swinging toys down when I take mine in the car, as they tend to knock about.

I was thinking that as I posted. I think in yoghurt, there is fermentation of lactose to lactic acid, so the birds can tolerate it better because less lactose?? Some lactose intolerant people can still eat yoghurt. I just read over what the site I posted said, it does say that yoghurt is considered pretty safe because the probiotics use up the lactose. It's not in all dairy products, as I think cheese is okay in small amounts too.

Hi Rod, welcome to our forums. From what I know birds are lactose intolerant - several sites I have just googled seem to confirm this. Birds are not mammals, they were not made to drink milk. They can't digest lactose so tends to upset their gut and give them bad diarrhoea. There is a definite limit to how much milk products you can give your bird. I strongly advise against letting your budgie drink straight milk. Have a read of this: http://www.exoticpetvet.net/avian/dairy.html

His behaviour changes might just be from being sick and in a strange place for a long time. He might have lost his trust in people being in a place where he wasn't given constant attention/care, and be depressed (not wanting to sing and wanting to sleep lots) because he feels ill. His calling/desire to be with other birds is probably because he got used to being around other birds while at boarding. I too would take him with me, birds can go downhill fast, at least you will be able to watch him constantly and you know what to look for. And I'm with MB, we have some excellent birds vets here. Is he okay after the window crash?? That bleeding and sleepiness does not sound good to me at all.

The other threads of euthanasia and wildlife rescue reminded me about something that happened last year. It was too long to put there so I post it here, as it is about my journey as vet student. This story is long and may be distressing in that it is about euthanasia, and also a bit morbid/graphic. My friends and I, we three vet students, went for a weekend road trip out west. We'd had so much fun staying along the beach and were heading west to my friend's farm where we would stay for the next week. We were smack bang in the middle of nowhere, and I really mean that - nothing but empty paddocks, a tiny town here and there, and a few big dairy farms. One of us spotted a big roo on the side of the road. We stopped, did a U turn and went to check for life and pouch young, but it turned out to be a big male grey and he was very dead. Using our knowledge we deduced he was killed on impact - probably a truck. So we piled into the car to go back the way we came. As we pulled into a dirt driveway to turn around, one of us noticed something in the ditch next to the road. I looked over and sure enough, another roo. This one was breathing. We all got out and had a look at it - another male. He was lying deep in the ditch which was full of muddy water, panting, his legs obscured from view. It didn't look good at all. We ran up the driveway to see if there was somebody we could get, but it turned out to be a mobile phone tower. So there we were, middle of nowhere, no one around. To my shame, not one of us could remember the wildlife help number. We flagged down the next car and all they could tell us that the roo looked injured, and they didn't know the number... helpful. We got back in our car and went for a drive to see if there was anything else around. A little way up there was a house. We went in and there was a teenage boy. He gave us the wildlife help number. Phew. We drove back towards the roo and found that not one of us had reception on our mobiles - not even with a phone tower right next to us! So we decided to check our roo in the ditch to see if we could at least pull him out of the cold water. We got there to see he had tried to move, and we could now see his legs. They were broken all the way through, as in, the bone was jutting out in several places and the leg was hanging by a bit of skin. I could not begin to imagine the pain he was in. The cold was probably doing him a service in dulling it somewhat. We all knew now that this roo had to be put out of his misery right there - there was no way we could carry him and no way he would survive on one leg. And not one of us was going to walk away to let him suffer a slow, cold, painful death. The teenager had been wary and reluctant to help, so we decided to go in another direction, to a house 100 metres up. We knocked and knocked but it was totally empty. So we went back to the boy's house and now there was a sister. We heard him say "jeez now they want a vet" to her. I guess to a casual non-animal orientated person we seemed like mad hippies or something for caring about a random wild animal we'd only just found. She was helpful though, well, by telling us there was no real help. The closest vets were an hour away in each direction (it was also getting dark and we were getting edgy about being in the middle of nowhere, we were also expected at our destination for dinner). Also, we had to be realistic, in that the vet would need to be paid a lot for driving that far at this time on a Sunday and none of us had much money. The police might be of help, though the nearest town was pretty far, extremely tiny and might not have anyone on duty. Wildlife help people would probably have to done the same thing (call a vet or police) and they too would have taken a while to get to where we were, out there in the middle of nowhere in the dark. We drove off and in our desperation called triple 0 (emergency number for you non-Aussies). To my disbelief, that didn't get through either! No reception. That really shocked me; what if it was a person needing immediate emergency help?? Anyway, we admitted that a dying animal was not high on their list of concerns. We went back to check on the roo and go through our options. We were really desperate now, and well, we were trained in euthanasia so maybe...? But talked it over briefly and realised that we didn't have anything sharp (besides which he probably didn't have the best blood pressure), doubted anything would have worked for a big roo skull, and he could probably still injure somebody badly in that state. Besides... none of us had the guts. The teenagers seemed to have given us all they could and it seemed a bit rude to annoy them yet again. So we tried our luck with that other house, which was empty still. Figuring that farmers must have guns, we drove to two further houses on dairy farms which were empty (considering the sun had set, it was probably milking time. Interestingly, one of the houses had a dead cow just lying there out the front). Then, in our last desperate bid, we drove all the way along the highway another farm. The house was totally empty. But with no other choice we walked around their farm and finally found people feeding calves. They were very friendly and I guess we looked pretty distraught. Straight up, we told the farmer where the roo was and what to do, and he said he would do it straight away. My friends decided to leave then. I wanted closure, to be assured that the poor creature would not be spending a cold night in a ditch in agony, but it was dark and now pouring and we really, really had to be going home. So we left. I don’t really have a moral or anything, other than I believe that bringing about death can be merciful and based on compassion, not greed/laziness. Also have the wildlife number on hand (In Victoria it is 0417 380 687 or 13 000 94535), please check for life if you see injured wildlife on the road, and go check if you think you’ve done it yourself. Also, the number 000 can still be called via satellite if you ring 112, you can reach it even if there is no reception – very important that you know this number, you never know when you need it. I just wanted to share this story, because among vets it’s well known that there are animals you meet in your life that will stay with you forever. This kangaroo was one of mine.

Arrgh! I can't believe I was so careless! I was eating chocolate and Squee came over and ate a crumb! Just a little nibble, but I'm still so worried because I saw her chewing as I chased her off. I hope what has been said in this thread about it being okay in small doses is true

Way to go MB Good to know I'll have a bird-crazy person as a registered wildlife carer that I can send my wildlife cases to

Oh boy. I suppose I experience it a little differently from a lot of you, being almost a veterinarian. Often times it will be myself who has to put down someone else's beloved pet- I try not to think about this but it's going to be a lot. It depends on the situation. I'm not anti-euthanasia but I believe in case-by-case decisions. It's beautiful and wonderful with the cases that make it through a terrible nearly-no-chance-of-survival incident. But myself, personally only, I wouldn't put an animal through terrible pain and suffering on a slim chance that it will make it, live and be happy after. To me, letting that happen is a form of cruelty. (It's also a legality for me to take all measures to minimise suffering when I can (of course this is a subjective clause) and I can get in a lot of trouble for my decisions on what to do with any animal. It's also in the Veterinarian's Oath.) I'm going to flat out refuse to euthanase healthy animals when I'm in practice. I'm going to at least try to rehome it, and it's probably going to get me in trouble with the boss but oh well. Personally I believe in assessing quality of life. I've seen a budgie who had squamous metaplasia all down his throat due to vitamin A deficiency. It was all lumpy and ulcerated inside his mouth. There was no way he could eat much longer. He was going to starve to death, if he didn't dislodge an ulcer and bleed to death first. I couldn't let my pet live like that. Likewise if an animal is in its death throes, I know it is going to die, there is nothing medically I can do, I most certainly I will give the green dream to ease the process. But I don't believe in using it as an 'easy solution'. For my own pet I will sure as heck fight to keep them going - given that the quality of life is going to be acceptable. That subjective 'quality of life' I assess as both a vet and a pet owner. I don't take it lightly, it is not a tool to make my life easier... only theirs. So not anti-euthanasia but not flat out pro, either. It's all about the situation. I also believe in letting each person decide for themselves once they have assessed the whole situation, based on what is best for their pet.