Diseased

Now that we have pigs, I'm all kinds of worried that the things will begin coughing or sneezing. Ironically, it has nothing to do with H1N1 Swiney Flu. Well, I guess it does sort of. The swine flu hype has me thinking about sick pigs, which reminded me that the first year we were pig owners, one suddenly died. Suddenly as in within minutes.

I realize that the thing must have been sick longer than a few minutes because the vet did an autopsy on site (sooo cool - I seriously should have been a vet) and we learned that pneumonia was the killer. I also learned that if you toss a lung in a bucket of water and a part of it sinks, it has fluid in it. Of course, this only works on dead things so by then the diagnosis certainly isn't life altering.

Our only heads' up was the fact that the pig wouldn't eat, and if a pig isn't eating there's something seriously wrong with it. Like it's about to die in a few minutes. The kids said that it was a wee bit coughy in the morning but who panics over a tiny cough?

Okay, I do now. I remind the kids daily to check the pigs for heavy breathing, coughing or sneezing. I worry that one will die again. And I have the swine flu to thank for making that first and foremost in my mind.

So far the wee porkers are healthy, and eating like pigs. It's a good sign.

I wish I could say the same for the puppies. You thought the kennel chaos was over, didn't you? Well, the joke is on you because apparently as long as we have puppies we'll have problems.

I noticed last week that the puppies had a bit of bloody stool, but as I'd just dewormed them I figured it was a result of that. I gave it a day or two to clear up, but it didn't. So I did what any dog owner would do in my situation and took a Ziploc baggie of infected poo to the vet for a fecal floation.

We have giardia. Aren't we the lucky ones.

This is easily (if not expensively) fixed by dosing once daily for 7 days with a paste wormer heretofore used for horses. The good news is that we can use the leftovers on the ponies because they're due to be wormed again this month. The bad news is that we're clueless where the stupid parasite could have come from.

Giardia is generally contracted from contaminated drinking water and a lot of people bring it home as a souvenir when they visit a third world country. We have a well, and I can attest that it's not contaminated because not only would the puppies be having problems, but the adult dogs, the horses and the people would have the trots like nobody's business, along with vomiting and severe weight loss. While the weight loss would be nice to partake of, none of that stuff is going on.

It's always something, isn't it?

I'll not only be dosing every dog we own for the next week, I'll also be disinfecting everything the dogs touch with bleach. Now would be a good time to take out stock in Clorox.

Have I mentioned that this is one of those rare maladies that happily transmits between species? Yeh, it is. Lucky us.