Bacchus Residents

Hello again, readers, Not too often do we have to introduce and say farewell to a resident all within one post. Unfortunately, Bert's time with us was short, but we loved him all the same. Despite only being with us for less than 2 weeks, we have a fair amount to tell you about him and his courageous battle. Warning: This post will contain content which some readers may find distressing. Bert's Arrival:  First of all, Bert came into our care after recently losing his cage mate to an unknown cause. He'd understandably become quite depressed, so his owner was seeking a new retirement home with someone experienced in bonding elder bucks. We decided to reach out to them and offer him a home to live with our current bucks; Alfie, Arthur, and Rowan. Upon arrival, it became very clear to us that Bert was living with an undiagnosed pituitary tumour and osteoarthritis. We decided to hold off for an hour or two and monitor his behaviour before administering any strong drugs t

Today's post is pretty self-explanatory; Duncan and all of our resident degus are some of our eldest residents. Sadly, with old age, things do start to go wrong - health-wise.  Duncan had a little bit of a embarrassing problem, to say the least.  This post contains content some readers may find distressing. All of a sudden whilst going about our daily business, one of our degus started to make a distressing  alarm-call.  For those of you who don't have degus, it is hard to explain their difficult vocabulary. They have a range of calls which vary in complexity and meaning. In simple terms, it's conversation in degu-language. It takes a lot of experience to learn to recognize the different calls and figure out what it is that your degu is saying to both you, and their cage mates. To familiarize yourself, we recommend visiting ' Degutopia '. We will post a link at the end of the post to the relevant part of their website.   W hen we figured out it was Duncan m

Hello again, readers We had noticed that our blog was consisting of mostly medical themes recently. Though we seem to be at the vets more often than we would obviously like, we do 90% of our work at home. Day to day we care for our animals - our work is never finished - there is always something that can be done. With that in mind, we thought we would do a write up about one of our previous resident Hybrid Dwarf Hamsters - Molly. Molly was taken in as a pregnant dwarf hamster by Hamster Haven (rescue) many years ago. She had successfully birthed a healthy litter of pups and did a wonderful job raising them. We decided to adopt her along with her son, Tuc. All of her pups were snapped up, but Molly herself had no interest. We'd just about started dipping our toe in independent rescuing at this point, but we also still adopted animals as pets too. When Molly arrived home, we quickly fell in love with her character. She was extremely energetic and social - you couldn't walk

Hello again, readers, Today's post will be about briefly discussing the notes from Percy's X-Ray radiograph to help monitor his case of dental disease. The radiograph itself was taken a few weeks back now, but nonetheless it is still relevant for Percy's current treatment plan.  We aren't vets (not even remotely close) but we will try our best to relay the message on to our followers who care so deeply about our residents. We will also enclose a useful link at the end of this post for more information on the subject. We've previously written a couple of posts ( 1 ) ( 2 ) on Percy's condition. It is rather unusual how only the males within Percy's family seem to have all suffered with some sort of dental abnormality - it suggests it's possibly something hereditary, although, on the other hand, correlation doesn't always mean causation. Sadly, we lost Neville (Percy's brother) some time ago after he developed severe rapidly worsening root elo

Hello again, readers, In Today's post we will be discussing Ronald's semi-recent diagnosis of heart failure and how we noticed Ronald's symptoms. We will briefly mention about the medications we are using and scrape the surface as to why they can help with some of the symptoms of heart failure.  As always, we will break the post down into clearly labelled sections so you can pick and choose the bits you'd prefer to read. Although we will be discussing medical topics (in basic terms) this information should not be substituted instead of medical advice from a qualified veterinarian if your pet is ill. How the diagnosis came about: To set the scene, we'd very recently lost a gerbil - Bradley - making Brandon friendless. We knew Brandon would be very lonely without his life-long cage mate and sibling by his side. We thought we had the perfect fix for Brandon - Ronald. Ronald is a 3-4 year old gerbil with a significant disability; he's missing a limb. F

Hello again, readers, We wanted to follow on from our previous post introducing the 8 new resident doe rats. Within that post we briefly mentioned about Nella and Xander having mammary tumours which needed to be removed. Conveniently , around about the same time Leia had developed yet another tumour. We had our concerns if it would've been within the her best interest to keep surgically removing tumours - she had only just recovered from her last surgery when this tumour sprung up. We decided that it could've just been the worlds worst case of bad luck (it is Leia after all) and we went ahead and booked her in for surgery too. Should the tumours have continued to return, we would reassess the situation with our vet (please note that Leia is already on specialist preventative medication and is also spayed). So, the three does were having the same surgery on the same day. This post will contain graphic content which some readers may find distressing. We will enclose lab

Hello again, readers, That's probably the longest title we've ever typed! Today's post is all about introducing the 8 new doe rats who've recently come into our home due to their previous owner having some difficulty managing the treatment for their health. Their day to day care was brilliant, however, a couple of the females unfortunately fell ill, and when their owner acknowledged they could no longer manage, they made the noble and selfless decision to hand them over to someone who could - us. We saw their advert on 'Rat Rescue Network UK' and something about the girls just touched us and we decided to offer a helping hand. All will become clear if you make it to the end of the post (or you can cheat, we will split the post into clearly labelled sections). Amelia: Amelia is a roan dumbo at approximately one year old with no known health conditions. She's a sweet and cheeky doe with bundles of character. Amidala: Amidala is a blue hooded dumb

Hello again, readers, Firstly, I wanted to add in a brief section to say that I started writing this post with the belief that Derrick was going to make a full recovery. Before Derrick passed away, he had been battling kidney disease and/or failure alongside a persistent UTI (urinary tract infection). I've decided to post a singular blog post with minimal amendments about both Derrick's tremendous battle with his health, and his passing. I appreciate that there will be a lot of information crammed into the one post, but I believe it will show a true representation about the entire process. With that being said, I won't say any more on the matter and will let you get on with reading the post. This post will include a section about what happened prior to medical investigation, and a section about the medical investigation itself. We will break it all down into clearly labelled sections to make it easier for you to pick out the bits you'd prefer to read: Part One - T