I’ve seen half-eaten critters of every species, pussy wounds full of maggots, and all sorts of injuries, including the time when one of our horses ripped off her eyelid on a fence nail. I kept it on-ice until we got it re-attached.
I’ve had the systematic desensitization and today I can eat a chili dog with one hand while scraping fly maggots from an abscess with the other hand.
Before the anal prolapse, my grossest experience was lifing an upside-down bucket to find a decomposing rooster under it (I had Jen1 dispose of the oosing carcass and she has never eaten chicken since).
Girls, they are way too sensitive about dead things. . . .
Perhaps we should make a squirrel coffin and give the half-eaten tree rats a fancy funeral:
Mad Squirrel Disease
A few weeks back, our cat (Tiger) was munching on warm squirrel entrails, and I knew that this tasty tidbit might kill her.
We all remember this article in the New York Times titled Kentucky Doctors Warn Against Eating Squirrels' Brains, where they note that squirrel brains can cause a fatal variant of Mad Cow Disease, known around here as “Mad Squirrel Disease”, and at least six people have died:
"Families that eat brains follow only certain rituals. ''Someone comes by the house with just the head of a squirrel,'' Dr. Weisman said, ''and gives it to the matriarch of the family. She shaves the fur off the top of the head and fries the head whole. The skull is cracked open at the dinner table and the brains are sucked out.'' It is a gift-giving ritual. "
It's no joke, there is a moratorium on eating squirrel brains in North Carolina, and many a redneck has had to switch to less desirable organs.
Anyway, I let Tiger finish the squirrel chitlins, and I snatched-up the carcass just as she got around to eating the head.
Now, I couldn’t just throw it in the woods since Tiger would just go fetch it. To be safe, I decided to take the disemboweled tree rat into the Rampant Office building, and I rested the squirrel head-up in Jen3’s wastebasket.
Jen3 noticed it later and you could hear the scream for a half-mile. Left-to-right, here is Jen1, Noel the Yorkie and Jen3.
Anyway, I consider myself immune to grossness, but that was before Dirty Hairy’s prolapsed rectum.
Prolapsed Rectum
Awhile back, I went out to do the morning chores when I found Dirty Hairy (a tiny two-foot tall dwarf horse) lying down, with a foot of shiny pink intestines hanging out of his hiney hole.
Hairy is a seriously deformed dwarf horse, and this is an unaltered photo of him. As you can see, his body is way out of porportion, and his dong is so long that it drags the ground.
We call him the five-legged horse.
Anyway, a prolapsed rectum is really gross, and it looked something like this dog example:
I asked Penny to call our horse Vet (Dr. Chris O’Malley), and the conversation went something like this:
"Hairy’s done pooped out about a foot of his gut"
"Rectum?", Dr. O’Malley asked.
"Yeah, wrecked him good, I reckon".
Dr. O’Malley arrived immediately and within a few minutes he was stuffing Hairy’s gut back inside. To keep it from happening again, he took some fishing line and stitched a circingle around his anus, and he said that his rectum should work OK until Hairy healed. The opening looked too small to me . . .
Hairy's Anal Retention
Well, no more than two hours later, I hear Hairy screaming like he's being eaten-alive. I came out, and sho-nuff, Hairy can't poop, and he was obviously in a lot of pain, straining and screaming.
So, I call Dr. O'Malley and he says that I should loosen the stitch, but just enough to let him poop. I must admit that I was mighty concerned that Hairy’s guts would spill out into my lap, like a scene from a bad horror movie. Instead, O’Malley rushed over. When he finally cut-loose of the stitching, Hairy pooped-out about half his total body weight, no lie. It was amazing. You never have a camera around when you need one . . .
Today, Hairy has some leg problems, and we have had to put him in a miniature horse wheelchair, and he gets around just fine.
Dr. O’Malley says he will include this story in his book “Horse 911”, and I’m real anxious to hear his take on Harry's prolapsed rectum.
