Okay. I give up.
I try to keep the focus on beavers here and not on the absurdities of my life, but this came into our home recently and has been making typing very challenging.
Did you ever have one of these? I believe they are also called “time-eaters”, “furniture destroyers”and “finger-biters”. They have all the charm of a new born baby with agile long legs and very sharp teeth. We are in the early stages of acceptance a la Kubler-Ross. First there’s denial that your life has forever changed and nothing will be the same again. I briefly touched the Anger stage this morning when my foot stepped in something unmentionable on the carpet.
What does this have to do with beavers? Well McKenzie was a shelter puppy, her litter mates were all put down and came to us so young she still had part of her umbilical cord attached. She arrived with what our vet called a “heavy intestinal load” of worms, coccidia, and giardia. I just looked them up and was reminded of giardia’s “nickname”.
BEAVER FEAVER!
No she didn’t get this from a beaver, and when people get giardia from beaver ponds it is because people have put it into the water first. Way back in the early days I was cautioned by our beaver friend Mike Callahan about Waterboards and their fear of Giardiasis. It was one of the first things I researched before my days on the subcommittee. A history of misinformation has sometimes blamed beavers for this disease, instead of realizing that they are carriers of our (and our pets) infections. Kenzie will ride through the proper treatments and modern medicine will set her straight very soon, but in the mean time I just had to smile at the fates.
When I first saw the beavers I was with my adult lab Calypso. She would lay on the bridge patiently while I filmed strange furry things in the water that were not her. She was a gentle soul, a beloved companion, and the most popular patient at any pet clinic. In her younger days she loved to fish by standing in a shallow school of minnows and leaping upon one that caught her eye. Caly died this spring after a very long and lucky life, and Kenzie will become the new friend to the beavers eventually.
To get things started on the right foot (paw?) she found the beaver chew on the porch yesterday and decided to make a few gnaw marks of her own. So far so good.
