Country mouse on rats

Going to the vet makes me nervous. It’s the waiting room bit. Although terriers are good patients they don’t seem to be as afraid of vets as labradors they’d like to kill everything else on the sick list. I sit praying for everyone to hurry with their appointments, as the terrier eyes the waiting gerbils, cats, rabbits and rats.

Last time, it ended in a wrestling match on the floor as everyone else stood on their chairs, clutching their loved ones. It wasn’t pretty, and nor were the looks I got. I was therefore very glad that there was no pet rodent in attendance when I raced through the snow to the vet last week.

Molly was bleeding profusely from her eye, and despite it being past 10pm, Martin, the vet, waited for us to arrive an extraordinary service. He probed around and announced that, despite the bleeding, the eye would be all right and that a rat was the culprit. Vets deserve a badge of honour for what they do. Imagine a similar scenario in a hospital!

However, the only badge of honour handed out was to a little dog sporting a war wound over her left eye, and, as she showed me in the morning, a very dead rat underneath the hydrangea.