Nose Tucks Are Serious Business

Our Winter Mice

Each winter we get one field mouse in the house. The first winter, this was hard for me to accept. I was screaming, on furniture, about to faint, yada yada.

Ok, so I still have a tendency to scream, but we are MUCH better prepared. So our winter mouse decided to visit early this year. I can usually know when there is a mouse within about a day of his/her arrival. My OCD tendencies cause me to zone in on the "signs" of a mouse. :)

I had seen some, what I suspected to be, mouse droppings under our kitchen sink cabinet earlier in the day. The cabinet had been almost completely emptied once I moved everything into the new laundry room, so it was clean and obvious to me that we had a visitor. Penny's attentiveness to the cabinet confirmed my suspicions. Of course the timing was perfect and Charles was out of town.

Kristin and Rob came up and we put the (humane) trap down to catch our little offender. About 5 minutes later we caught the little guy, with the help of some canned dog food. I changed clothes to walk him across the street and release him at the vacant house, where we have released all of his relatives in the past, and when I came back, there was a SECOND mouse in the trap! There have been no mouse sightings since!

Sweet Melissa

Unfortunately we lost our Sweet Melissa this past Saturday. Although we are relatively new to alpaca ownership, we have heard of meningeal worms, which cause paralysis in alpacas and goats if not caught early enough. There are many theories on how to prevent and treat this, but time is crucial. Unfortunately we were given an outdated treatment by our vet and couldn't save our girl in time.

We are now better prepared to tackle this if it occurs in another of our 'pacas, but it sure was sad to lose our sweet gal.