Cleaning and tidying day on the farm. Thanks for the help small goat child!

Did you look under the tray?

Oh. No I didn’t, sorry.

landlords can choke. they charge exorbitant amount of money for housing which is a human RIGHT. "but that's how they make money/live!" so they think it's ok to leech off of other's work/paychecks and then price gouge because of the popularity of the area, living demand, natural disasters, etc????

Me: did you know that tenrecs are one of the oldest mammalian species on earth, they are also one of the most widely diverse ones and while they closely resemble shrews, opossums, hedgehogs or even otters they are not related to any of these species but share a common ancestor with elephant shrews, golden moles, elephants, sea cows, hyraxes and aardvarks - a common ancestry that wasn't recognized until the late 1990s, yet that's not the only special thing about these insanely interesting mammals; their low body temperature and downright weirdly flexible metabolism baffles scientists and no one knows how the common tenrec manages to hibernate for up to 9 months without arousel periods (a world record) meaning they could help us discover how hibernation evolved or heck, even how endothermy evolved! By the way this same species holds another world record, most young in one litter (mammals) - 32. Tenrecs have extremely primitive features like a cloaca which is usually seen in birds and reptiles and some of these features are even thought to pre-date Shrewdinger (our hypothetical first placental ancestor). The common tenrec has no zygomatic arches (cheek bones) and a smooth lissencephalic brain and might not even have a corpus callosum-

Pancake came to my partner’s hedgehog rescue seriously overweight at 800g. She was renamed from Petunia because…well. She did this -

Granted, I’m small & have short legs, but she was just massive! Her previous owner had loved her a lot, but hadn’t had the time to be very hands-on with her.

We had a lot of trouble enticing her to eat and she started to lose weight. She was very picky about food and was pretty resistant to being changed to anything healthier for her. Unfortunately, this all came to a tipping point around Easter, while I was hedgie-sitting her. She stopped eating completely and needed an emergency vet visit on Easter for sub-q fluids, and to be checked for a URI.

I’d fallen in love with Pancake pretty much the night we met her. I asked my partner if I could keep her & adopt her, because I was in a better position to spend the money on vet bills. So, Pancake was my Easter present!

Unfortunately, the next two months ended up being pretty stressful for everyone. She ended up with a ringworm infection on her feet and in her toenails. She didn’t start eating on her own again & I had to regularly syringe-feed her. Further vet visits showed that her liver values were very high and something was going on there. Further tests were inconclusive - the options were either liver cancer or hepatic lipidosis (fatty liver disease or FLD). The vet suggested exploratory surgery and a biopsy to figure out which one it was, since there was no way to tell otherwise. 

This was a later picture of her surgery incision, where it was getting more healed up! She came through surgery fine, though we had a rough first couple nights where she was having a little more trouble with pain than we’d expected. Lots of hedgie & hedgie-mama crying! She improved after that though and we waited for the biopsy results to come in. They confirmed that it was hepatic lipidosis, due to her not eating enough and losing weight too quickly. 

At this point, I’d been syringe-feeding this little-big girl 3-4 times a day for over a month, I think. I was starting to think she was never going to eat on her own again. But just when the vet and I were discussing the feasibility of putting a feeding tube in a hedgehog…..

She decided that her syringe-feeding mix was the Best Thing Ever! She was climbing into the bowl to eat! I insisted on continuing to help some because she was better at getting the food all OVER her instead of inside her, but this was the point where we finally had hope for her again. The relief was overwhelming! And because it’s one of the cutest pictures I’ve taken of her, here she is waiting for Mom to get her for mealtime - 

It took at least another month to wean her off of the syringe-feeding mix and find a commercial wet food that she could be convinced to eat. But things were uphill from there!

Just over a year later, she is still one of my proudest accomplishments (though she did most of the work!) and she makes me smile constantly. I will never get tired of seeing how much she loves to eat now - she’ll come out of her sleeping spot and be waiting impatiently for me if I’m late with their dinner! She’s still very picky, but I’ve found a number of extra treats she’ll eat, like mealworms, superworms, dubia roaches, and raw meat grinds. 

With being a healthy weight and recovered from all of her major health issues, she’s become one of the most personable hedgies I’ve met. She loves to snuggle and sleep on me, totally out in the open.

We’d discovered during the months before her illness that she actually likes belly rubs and they’ll put her to sleep sometimes!

She still likes to dig in her food while she eats, and creates a horrible mess! So I gave up and just started giving her little fleece place mats that I can change out.  And on the plus side, she also likes to clean her own paws, which is the cutest thing I’ve EVER seen. At some point, I’ll have to get a video of it uploaded! For now, here’s a still from one of the videos.

Okay so I need 3 eggs

*walks over the fridge*

3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs 3 eggs

*opens fridge*