After the Thai chicken fiasco from my last shift, I bring you a real chicken rescue! But hold your horses – it was the last rescue of the shift, so it’s placed at the end of this post for chronological reasons more than daft writing hooks!
I’m a Chicken!
I was planned in to drive for this shift and I wasn’t looking forward to it on account of many roadworks in the area. There was some discussion over the best routes to take and my co-rider was very involved in them, so much so I wondered whether she thought she was driving. When I asked she replied in the negative but said she wouldn’t mind driving if I’d prefer to be the co-driver.
I declined the last time I was offered this choice and I’m glad I did. But this time I declined on the grounds that I was looking after myself. Call me a chicken by not facing my fears, but I figured I’d be driving next week anyway (my planned co-driver can’t drive) and the small ambulance I’m allowed to drive will be taken off the road in October, so I may as well focus on developing my co-driving skills instead of very short-term driving.
3 Kittens
Not a rescue for us, but a rescue that had been! Three sweet black kittens were found and kept at the base until an external driver could bring them to a rescue centre. So we went to have a look at them. All 3 were extremely frightened and hissed as we approached so we backed away and left them alone. It’s the first time I’ve seen timid kittens.
It turns out that later in the day more kittens had been found in the same area as these 3. Arrangements were underway to place a cat trap in the neighbourhood to see if there were any more.
Young Wood Pigeon
This young bird was a cat victim and we expected to see quite a mess. Indeed, there’s a mess of feathers and things, so much so we couldn’t determine whether it really was a pigeon or not. Google lens first identified it as a wild bird(!) and on a second attempt reported is as a “Wood Pigeon”.
The finders were proud they’d called the animal ambulance several times in the past for a variety of animals, but I can’t help wondering how many of them were attack victims from their own cat.
We brought the pigeon to the rescue centre where I took the opportunity to take a picture of the driver placing the box with the pigeon into the collection cupboard. I’ll use this in my article for the animal ambulance magazine about the rescue centre, due to be published in November this year.
Baby Rabbit
Another cat attack victim 🙁 The finder spotted a cat playing with this poor rabbit and managed to free him and place him in a box for safety. The rabbit looked intact other than some blood on his lip, but as you can see from the photos, he was still shocked and very frightened.
We brought him back to the base with us, where he received a lot of attention from the gardeners on-site (who can blame them!) and awaited an external driver that the centralist had arranged to bring him to a rescue centre.
At Last! The Chicken!
The final rescue of the day was our chicken! She’d been wandering around a residential area, and despite messages on the neighbourhood whatsapp group and facebook page, there were no reactions. The finder put her in a cage, gave her some cat food, and gave us a call.
Finding the location was really tough! The neighbourhood was like a rat run; several roads and junctions and nooks and crannies, all with a single road name and houses with numbers in no sensible mathematical logic. To make matters worse, the navigation tried sending us through a tunnel which was too low for the ambulance! We decided it would be easiest to park up and walk around.
A local lady wheeling out her wheeley bin commented that the enormous box we fished out of the van would probably be big enough. I quipped that otherwise we could use her wheeley bin! When we eventually found the correct house, this lady turned out to be the finder!
I wanted to pick up the chicken and place her in our box; this beauty is the largest animal I’ve encountered close up on any of my rescues, but the finders was literally very hands-on and before we knew it, had wrestled the chicken into the box. Which was just about big enough! 😉
She got a nice welcome when we brought her to the rescue centre; a cockerel crowed as soon as I stepped outside the ambulance with the chicken!
Shifty Reflections
I don’t regret not driving, though I felt I’d shot myself in the foot a bit because some of the co-driver tasks were overwhelming and it made me feel as if was switched off; a couple of the rescues I’d completely forgotten to complete the admin until the last moment, and a couple of phone calls were way beyond the scope of my understanding of Dutch. Mind you, a lot of conversations with the centralist and the finders went well, and all of the admin was completed, so I suppose I didn’t do too badly and I finished on a good note! 🙂
Perhaps. I feel guilty about drinking chicken flavoured soup.
