as small as a world and as large as alone, youneedacat: Help a sick parrot

8:55pm September 17, 2014

Help a sick parrot - Hard Core Spirituality

youneedacat:

As followers of this blog know, I do everything I reasonably can to keep money from mixing with this blog. But there are exceptions to nearly every rule, and the biggest of all exceptions is to preserve life. I live with a rescue parrot, Peri, who before her confiscation by the police a few years ago had been brutally starved …

This is one of my closest friends in the world, and her relationship with her parrot means everything to her. Like everyone else I know who has had to resort to begging for money online, she did not take this option until everything else was exhausted. She is dirt poor, in serious debt (partly due to vet bills), and doesn’t always have money for food at the end of the month.

I was there when her last parrot died. It was heart-rending. All the way to the vet, my friend was screaming at the top of her lungs, crying, and begging her parrot not to die. Everyone at the emergency vet waiting room felt for her. She was in mourning for over a month. A relationship with a pet who can talk back in English and actually make sense can become incredibly intense. And if anything, her bond with this newest bird is even more intense than before.

Peri is a fighter, and she survived things she shouldn’t have been able to survive. We’re hoping that with enough medical help she’ll survive the hepatitis and live a long life. But my friend doesn’t have the money, and I don’t have the money, and there’s nothing more powerless feeling than not having the money to take care of a sick pet who you love more than life itself.

And to paraphrase clatterbane, if anyone responds to this with the idea that poor people shouldn’t have pets, I will fucking dropkick you for your cruelty. So don’t even go there. If you can’t or don’t want to donate, just don’t donate. But I can vouch for this being a very real situation — I help give the bird her meds, I help catch her when she flies away from her hospital cage, I have bite marks all over my hands to prove it.

So please, if you can do anything, click through and use her donation button to help her and her sick parrot. If you don’t want to just donate, you can also buy prayer beads from her prayer bead shop. (It’s a very unusual prayer bead shop — she even has “Reason Beads” for atheists or people whose faith includes a lot of rationality. They’re really cool. If they’re still there — I haven’t looked at her shop in a while. She tries to make prayer beads for any and all faiths and will often take custom requests. She’s helping me make prayer beads for my redwood forest faith-of-one, for instance.)

I know that if she loses this bird it will devastate her beyond anything I’ve seen before. She is even closer to this one than her last (honestly her last bird was an asshole and she was the only person in the world who liked him), and I saw how she took it when her last died. I don’t want to see what will happen if Peri dies.

So please click through if you want to learn more about Peri’s story and what’s going on with her, and maybe even donate or buy some prayer beads.

If you can’t donate, consider signal boosting. My friend doesn’t have a lot of web presence the way I do, so I’m trying to help her get more exposure for her bird’s situation.