A review of 2007

This time last year I computerised all my records and was able to see exactly what we had taken in and what happened to them. Well I've carried on with this throughout 2007 which is a great time saver and the time has come to look back over the last year and see what we achieved. Last years figures are in brackets for comparison.

In total during 2007 we took in 295 animals, actually pretty close to last years 292.

This breaks down as

4 chinchillas (2)
44 degus (8)
2 dogs (1)
7 gerbils (24)
1 fancy mouse (18)
128 rats (178)
8 roborovski hamsters (3)
2 russian hamsters (54)
99 spiny mice (0)

And what happened to them?

164 found new homes directly from here (201)
64 were returned to Furry Friends HQ to be homed from there (41)
20 of them died :( (12)
7 of them stayed here (9)
40 are still here (29)

It's interesting to review really, if a little disappointing. Rats are usually the biggest intake here yet we took in 50 less of them. Of course the big intakes of 2007 were degus and spiny mice which also explains the high number who were passed back to Emma to home as we swapped them between us to make the best use of home offers. It also explains why 13% of the animals we took in last year are still here :( Don't assume that these were Decembers intake - in truth we took in very few animals during December. 17 of those still here were admissions from January to April. Deaths are also up. More than half of these were spiny mice who arrived in terrible condition or who were born to sickly mice and didn't make it. There were also several degus who again arrived in terrible condition after years of neglect. There were also four baby rats from the Portsmouth Rescue who were horribly inbred and whose mothers were malnourished.

All in all, during 2007 we said goodbye to 31 dear friends.

Of my own animals:-
Apollo the chinchilla who died suddenly shortly after his second birthday
Dawn the roborovski hamster who finally scuttled off to the bridge at well over 2 years old
Squirt and Dumpling the rats who broke my heart when they were taken from me during a lice infestation
Dearest Poop the rat who made sure he was here to celebrate his 2nd birthday before he let that pituitary tumour take him
Fraggle the dog who died very suddenly from a virus after spending only 9 months with us.
Sweet Abbi rat who didn't quite make two and went suddenly but peacefully in her sleep

Of my foster animals:-
Fozzie the rat who had been returned from his home. A few weeks later he died from congestive heart failure.
Camilla the gerbil who was attacked and killed by her cagemates
Campari the russian hamster who died suddenly, probably from the stress of fighting with his cagemate
Trixie the very naughty rat who shocked us by dying very suddenly and for no apparent reason
12 spiny mice including Chummy, Scabby Hop-Hop and Chewy
Erwine the dog who was rescued from a horrible situation in Ireland. Sadly, just as things were finally looking up for him, he was found to have advanced lymphoma.
Donkey, Gordon and Nads the degus who I have written about recently.
4 baby rats from the portsmouth rescue, including little Merlin who had megacolon

My hope for 2008? To have fewer of these enormous rescues! In 2007 we had the huge spiny mouse rescue (99 animals), the huge degu rescue (44 animals) and the big portsmouth rat rescue (48 animals). In total these accounted for 191 of the animals we admitted - that's 65% of our intake!! The spiny mice rescue alone accounted for more than 1/3 of our intake. What made it worse was that two of these rescues were of animals which are hard to home, meaning that they spent a long time here and took up a lot of space, preventing us from taking in more homeable animals. Of course, it would be nice not to be needed at all but realistically I'd just like to be able to make good use of the little space I have here and be able to find more animals good homes quicker. I guess we'll just have to wait and see what the year brings.