Rod and I saved an entire family Thursday night...

... a family of opossums! It was tense for a moment as I slammed on my breaks and gripped the wheel, praying not to feel the bump of the tire over the soft little body of the opossum that was sitting in the middle of the road. As my car screeched to a halt, Rod said, "Oh, no, there are babies." So, with headlights in the distance behind us, we jumped into action. I popped the trunk and instructed him to pick up the babies off the road while I got our "car box", which I keep for just these occasions. Dumping its contents in the trunk and grabbing the leather gloves (by now there are cars lining up behind us), I ran to Rod and gave him the gloves, holding the box while he encouraged momma opossum inside. She went with little prodding. We then jumped back in, babies in the floorboard and mom in the box, and pulled off the road. I got the flashlight from the trunk to check the roadside for more babies (we had recovered 2, one was smashed on the road), and after about 5 minutes of looking and finding none, Rod calls to me "Uh oh, can you bring the light here and see if you still see these 2 on the floor board? I think one has crawled away." Sure enough, one was there, and the other was NO WHERE to be found. After about 20 minutes of searching, frantically, and listening to baby's hisses to try and pinpoint his location, I just knew that he was somewhere in the inner console of the car, unretrievable, and we'd just have to leave him there to die, at which point we'd have to go to Ford and pay them lots of money to disassemble my interior and remove its dead stinking body. Just then, Rod informed me that he could see it. It was behind a panel covering up some wiring. After ripping his fingernail off trying to remove the screws holding on the panel, a dime finally did the trick. We got it off just as the little booger was crawling behind some wiring... 30 more seconds and he would have been gone. Rod was able to grab his hind legs and pull the little guy out. RELIEF!

NOW what? Well, we headed home and called the local wildlife rehabber, Lynn Sciumbato. She said she'd be happy to take the babies, and after we described the apparent condition of the mother after both seeing her while scooping her off the road (her rear right leg was twisted 270 degrees and sticking straight out behind her), she said it sounded like euthanasia was her best option. Unfortunately, she wasn't able to perform that service, and said we'd probably have to wait until morning. Not wanting her to suffer, Rod called the 24 hour animal emergency clinic, and explained the situation, thinking surely a capable individual would be sympathetic to this suffering animal and gladly send her to a better place. Silly us... the vet who answered (who, oddly enough, just so happened to be OUR personal vet, Dr. Herring) was quite the opposite. He made it VERY clear that they were a privately owned business and operated FOR PROFIT, and if we wanted to pay $75 for a bit of euthanasia he'd do it, but really had no interest in it. He was rude and curt and unaccommodating; we will be writing a letter to Wedington Animal Hospital and requesting Haley and Scooter's records and changing veterinarians, as we would rather support a vet who actually cares for living beings and is not just out to turn a buck. Good for you Dr. Herring, hope you're happy, we've been clients for seven years, and now we'll be patronizing a more caring veterinarian.

In a round about way, we ended up getting the police department to page the on-call animal control officer, who just happened to be Tony Rankin (who we'd dealt with before)... NOW things were going our way! He is SUCH a nice guy who works at the Fayetteville Animal Shelter and gives so much. He agreed to leave his home 20 miles south at 10:00 at night and meet us at the shelter to euthanize the opossum. Well, apparently the opossum miraculously healed. He dumped it out on the shelter counter, and we quickly saw that more babies were still attached to her (Virginia Opossums, Didelphis virginiana, are our only marsupial! They are fascinating, extremely misunderstood animals who get a bad reputation for no reason.), which relieved me, as I knew it was doubtful she only had three and was worried I'd missed some that had crawled into the grass by the roadside. She didn't put up too much of a fight, and he looked her over really good, and unbelievably she was FINE! Ha! What a good ending to all of this! He said he'd have the vet look her over in the morning, just to be sure she was unharmed, then he'd take her to his house on several acres with a brushpile she could live in. Mr. Rankin - THANK YOU!