Silver Toes Sanctuary

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Silver Toes Sanctuary

Home to 32 mice, 5 gerbils, 4 rats & 2 cats � � Follow for ethical rodent care and advice, DMs open � �

03/09/2022

Oat lost his brother Pecan back in November 2021 sadly, very suddenly, we suspected it was a heart attack or stroke. 💔 we hadn’t seen him in a day or two, fearing the worst we starting to go through the bedding, looking for his body, and they live in big 4 foot tanks, so there’s a lot of bedding…

Now Oat was alone we wanted to find him a friend. Gerbils are notoriously hard to bond, but this was our first experience of it! So we went on the look out for lone gerbils needing homes and had Ash, a sweet, if a little feisty gerbil. We did the split tank method of bonding, swapping sides multiple times a day and sadly we were unable to bond them after a few weeks. Which left us with 2 lone gerbils, so off we went again, this time to Gerbil Rodent rescue, where we collected another lone gerbil Colin and 2 babies - Midnight and Twilight. Bonding adult gerbils to babies is so much easier then adult to adult and so within a few hours Oat’s parenting instincts kicked in and he was fast asleep with them 🥰 Unfortunately Ash and Colin also didn’t bond which left us once again with two lone gerbils… (more on the next post!)

27/08/2022

Ghost was with us for over a year and like Moth hated being held, but we tried to respect that and wouldn’t pick him up unless necessary. This enabled him to trust us and he would come and sit on your lap or shoulder in bed and loved to be stroked on his terms. It was so lovely to see how much progress he made. Towards the end of his life he developed what we believed to be respiratory issues, had various antibiotics to no avail. Which should have been a signal to us (hind sight is a wonderful thing & why I think it’s important to share their stories!) so putting him under for further investigations was obviously an option but I was hesitant to do that given his respiratory issues and the risks involved. He also developed a small lump on his back. Thankfully we made the decision to get the lump removed whilst it was small and also thank god got an X-ray at the same time. This showed us that he had a lump in his lungs, which almost filled up the whole of one side of his lungs. I didn’t realise the severity of the situation, but as soon as I saw the X-ray with my own eyes I knew the kindest thing was to get him put to sleep as soon as possible. We felt bad that he had likely had this lump slowly growing in his lungs for about 3 months.

Ghost passed away in early February 2022

Miss you little friend 🤍

17/08/2022

Moth’s story 🐁

Moth and his brother Ghost, two lovely individuals came to us after someone rescued them when they were going free online, but didn’t have the set up and had them living in a bath tub. They were estimated to be about 1 year old, very shy, scared of us and a little bitey, but loved wondering around my bedroom and could be tempted with malt paste! After quarantining them, we bonded them to the other boys, but Moth showed signs of hormonal aggression so we got him neutered, his neuter site got infected, and so the stressful time began, he wouldn’t eat his meds and he really needed them so we had to burrito him everyday and force feed them. He was not the biggest fan of humans so this was probably very scary for him! He also underwent another surgery to clean the infection out, one thing to note for any rat care givers is that we made a point to make our vet leave the site a little open, as infection would likely still be present, with an opening we were able to continue flushing it with saline and that again was not nice, we would fill a few new 1ml syringe with saline and stick them into the hole and flush the site. He also had to be held for this, so we always needed two people to do his full meds everyday. We were also having to wrap him with self adhesive bandages so he couldn’t get to he wound and open it up, as it was at risk of opening down to his intestines if we weren’t careful! Whilst this was all happening we noticed a lump form on his shoulder, it grew pretty fast. We somehow got on top of the infection after some stressful weeks. Then he went into surgery for the lump, we knew it may be a case of amputating his leg if they couldn’t get the suspected tumour completely off his shoulder, but the surgery actually did go well, the lump was removed without the need for amputation, tragically in recovery he went into cardiac arrest and our vets performed CPR on him but he passed away.

He went through so much, it was so so sad when he passed away 💔

He passed away in September 2021 after 4 months with us.

28/07/2022

A little update from us :) we have been very busy looking after all of our rodent family over the last year. It didn’t feel right to start posting again with the current residents without mentioning those who previously lived with us. Sadly rodents have very short lives. And with rescuing animals they haven’t always had the greatest starts in live.

Just over 2 years ago we took on 35 mice, all of which have now passed away, gradually ailments would arise or simply old age would take over and we got many of the mice put to sleep whilst others died naturally. Looking after an ageing mouse population was very intense and draining and included a lot of death in a short space of time, but we felt privileged that we got to look after them for the time we did. They got their weekly cage clean, health checks and register to keep on track of each individual. Carmilla was the last mouse standing who was about 2.5 years old when he passed away.

Also incredibly sadly all of the rats who we were looking after a year ago have passed away throughout the year, all succumbing to old age / their bodies not working well or lumps which were not operable. I would like to go into more details at some stage of some of the rats story’s as we learnt a lot with their various health care needs.

We also lost one of the gerbils pretty suddenly, we assume to a stroke or heart attack but the other four who were here a year ago are still going strong, just now looking a bit elderly!

❤️ 👼
Angel, Aurora, Buckbeak, Blueberry, Broccoli, Bella, Bambi, Cow, Carmilla, Darwin, Dobby, Fluffy, Fang, Goldenberry, Gollum, Gladriel, Hedwig, Kalette, Love, Luna, Lupus, Mordor, Moomin, Moomin Mumma, Morning Star, Rosie Cotton, Shadowfax, Snape, Snorkmaiden, Snuffkin, Sméagol, Wolf, Winky, Voldemort (the mice)

Berfin, Potato, Moth, Ghost, Storm, Lucifer and Silver (the rats)

Pecan (a gerbil)
❤️👼

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