From Cuong Nguyen
I was speechless when I witnessed this large raven attacking the great horned owl. Both came out OK after that, and the great horned flew away. Shot was taken last year in Ottawa.
From Cuong Nguyen
I was speechless when I witnessed this large raven attacking the great horned owl. Both came out OK after that, and the great horned flew away. Shot was taken last year in Ottawa.
No, this poor thing came into the clinic with a wing injury, we healed it up, and it was almost cleared for release, but its wing somehow broke again. We moved him out of the flight enclosure, but it just sat there all summer and never moved all that much. We didn’t know if he was just lonely, as the only raven, or what.
Its condition just wouldn’t improve and I never saw it eat much when I’d be on duty to feed it, so we sent it to get x-rays and it ended up that it had some kind of bone cancer or degenerative bone disease and all if its bones where just terrible, so we had to say goodbye to it.
It’s the animal that I really felt sorry for out of all 4000ish patients we had this year because it felt like it was so close to freedom and then its health just plummeted, and all of us put so much into trying to save it, and then learning we probably just unknowingly prolonged it hanging around just feeling miserable for that extra time… We’ve had to put down some absolutely gorgeous owls and other animals, but it’s because we don’t want them to hurt if they can’t be saved. But with the raven, we had no clue it had such a harsh internal thing going on, because it can’t tell us what is wrong with it if it’s something we can’t see… I just felt so bad for it, and I know a lot of others did too.
I really had little to do with it besides feeding it and cleaning up after it, and the whole experience really impacted me, so I can’t imagine how many times a year our head rehabbers that have to make the decisions to put animals down or not have to deal with asking themselves if they made the right choices.
I didn’t mean to be a downer, but I’ve never typed out my feelings on this before, and as I said, I’ve thought about this raven so much this year.
Thanks for sharing. Vets often tell me how hard it is to spot pain in most animals, because hiding pain is a defense mechanism.
Very true.
Even though our main focus as clinic volunteers is cleaning and feeding, that still gets us a lot of up close and hands on time with the animals after their initial diagnosis. If we keep our eyes out, even though we don’t have the kind of training the rehabbers do, we can still call out when we see something isn’t right, like they aren’t eating, feel cold, have a parasite that slipped by, etc. and they can get another checkup that can help us to modify the care they’re getting.
I’ve done all those things, and hopefully it has made a difference. We only have 2 full time people allowed to do the bulk of actual treatment, and with 4000+ patients a year, they don’t get the time to keep rechecking the work like we do. We are the second (and third, fourth, fifth) sets of eyes for them!