It’s easy to think that nature would be better off without humans sometimes, but we really are a part of nature. It’s just not always obvious.
But when animals are in need and humans are able to help them, we really shine. Look no further than Jannet Talbott.
You’d be hard pressed to find a more dedicated animal lover than Jannet Talbott.
On her ranch in Alberta, Canada, she raises horses, but also spends plenty of time helping local animals.
She rescues many lost or abused dogs and has plenty of bird feeders she keeps stocked year-round.
One day, as she sat on her deck, she noticed a squirrel in her yard having some trouble eating.
The poor squirrel had terribly curved, overgrown teeth.
They were so bad that one of the teeth looked like it might poke him in the eye at any moment. It’s surprising that he was able to survive so long.
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Jannet knew she wanted to do something to help the little guy, who she had decided to call Bucky.
So she had fetched a small live trap to set up in the garden, hoping to catch him.
In the end, she didn’t need the trap at all.
One day, she stumbled across Bucky digging through the bird feeder again. Since she happened to be wearing her leather work gloves, she was able to pick him right up.
Fair warning : an up close examination of Bucky’s teeth was not pretty.
“I literally reached in and grabbed him and then I think we were both shocked at that moment.”
She told Global News , “I took him in the house and put him in a plastic container. I put some holes in the top.”
And then she went to YouTube to figure out her next step.
You don’t need an expert to know that Bucky’s teeth were clearly in bad shape.
As happens in rodents, Bucky’s teeth never stopped growing, and they had grown incorrectly, with two of his incisors growing backwards in his mouth.
It was kind of amazing that Bucky was able to eat at all.
Jannet realized that he must have been surviving on the crushed and shelled seeds that were a staple of her bird feeder mix. Since they were already broken up, he could swallow them whole.
The YouTube video Jannet found gave her a critical piece of info.
Squirrels don’t have nerve endings in their teeth until you get close to the gum line. That meant she could trim Bucky’s teeth without fear of causing him pain.
So she got out a cuticle trimmer and gritted her own teeth.
“I felt confident that I could do it,” she said. “I had the tool. And so I just took a deep breath and said, ‘Bucky, we’re going to get you fixed up here.’ It literally took under 10 minutes to do it.”
The effect, for Bucky, was immediate.
After she put him back in the feeder, “He quickly ran to the branch and he rubbed and rubbed and rubbed his cheeks on there. You could just tell he was so elated to have those teeth gone from his cheek.”
Jannet has been keeping an eye on Bucky ever since her quick dental procedure.
“I watched him sharpen his newly trimmed incisors on a tree branch…fingers crossed he keeps them worn down,” she wrote on Facebook.
Jannet says she’s more than willing to help Bucky out again if his teeth do start to grow back.
“If he does have a jaw that’s not lined up, or if his upper and lower teeth don’t match…[this] could easily happen again,” she said.
“Thankfully he does live here and within a few months I’ll know and I can trim him again. I’m sure he would let me.”
In this photo she snapped a few months later, it looks like Bucky is doing A OK.
h/t: Global News
