The Hippo with Toothache Read Online Free PDF Page A

gathering information.
    The younger of the two women told the police she’d beendriving her mother from North Carolina to Virginia for a visit to her home in Harrisonburg five days earlier when they came upon the spotted fawn. It was lying in the grass alongside the road near Roanoke, Virginia. The fawn’s mother had been struck and killed by a car, she said. Not knowing what else to do, she added, they’d picked up the little Bambi, put him in the back of their van, and kept driving. They’d kept the animal with them ever since.
    When the police checked the back of the van, they found the spotted fawn panting heavily from the heat. It was wearing a disposable diaper because it had developed scours (diarrhea) from the cow’s milk the women had given him. Even more bizarrely, the bright sunshine streaming in through the van’s open door glittered as it struck the little fawn’s ears. The police stared at the animal in disbelief. Each ear was pierced with a cross-shaped rhinestone earring.
    The game warden arrived and announced that he was confiscating the fawn, to the histrionic objections of the two women. He placed a call to the Wildlife Center of Virginia (WCV) in Waynesboro, where I was the head veterinarian. The WCV is a wildlife hospital and wildlife education center that routinely cares for several thousand sick, injured, and orphaned wild animals each year. Of course, we told the game warden, we’d be glad to check out the fawn and make sure it was okay.
    When the fawn arrived, I performed a physical examination. My trusty hospital manager and head veterinary technician, Sarah Snead, restrained and calmed the nervous youngster. He weighed just thirteen pounds, and we guessed him to be only a few weeks old. There was no way we couldrelease this baby into the wild. I’d have to hold the fawn in our facility for several months until he was old enough to fend for himself.
    The fawn was dehydrated from the combination of heat and diarrhea. He also had an elevated temperature from being confined in the hot van. I removed the earrings from the fawn’s ears. Both ears were infected: the skin around the holes was red and inflamed.
    I treated the fawn’s dehydration with subcutaneous fluids, injected under the skin in several places across his back. The animal would gradually absorb the liquid. Once it was gone, we’d repeat the treatment several times. Then I started the fawn on antibiotic therapy—injections of penicillin—for the ear infections. I also treated these with a topical antibiotic.
    Next we had to deal with the scours and the presumptive tummyache that went along with them. Since fawn season had recently begun in western Virginia, we’d already received an initial supply of goat’s milk in preparation for the orphaned white-tailed deer fawns we knew would be coming our way.
    From prior experience, we knew that either fresh goat’s milk or powdered lamb-milk replacer worked best for raising orphan deer fawns; cow’s milk is not so good. The trick is not to overload the digestive system too fast, especially in a dehydrated animal. The fawn’s first bottle would be 25 percent goat’s milk and 75 percent water, the second one 50-50, and the third 75 percent goat’s milk and 25 percent water. That way, we’d allow the animal’s intestinal tract time to adjust before starting on pure goat’s milk. Our new fawn was hungry and took to the bottle readily. The holes in hisears healed in about two weeks, and I discontinued the antibiotics.
    The WCV routinely receives twenty to thirty white-tailed deer fawns every year. Some of these fawns are legitimately orphaned, found standing next to their dead mothers alongside a roadway after a fatal encounter with a car that couldn’t stop in time. But many “orphaned” fawns aren’t orphaned at all. Mother deer don’t spend all day with their babies. On the contrary, they