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I had not purchased a cage or carrying box of any kind, so the
next day I showed up at the clinic carrying a little dove in my
hands. The front desk had two English words for me, "Cannot
treat." So I asked if there was another clinic nearby that could
treat him. They referred me to a second clinic and gave me
directions on how to get there. I arrived and sat in the waiting
room. A woman carrying a cat in a cage arrived, and she came
over to see my dove. She said it was a "Fire Dove" and that the
bird I had in my hands was a male. She, herself, had a female
that had fallen out of the nest when it was a baby and couldn't
fly. She said that it was an endangered species. I said, "But
there are many of them around my nieghborhood." She said that
previously they had been endangered. I will spare you the
gruesome details, but I continued to wait for some time when it became
apparent there were animals with much more urgent needs than my
dove's broken wing, so much so, that if circumstances didn't
change I would never get in to see the veterinarian. My
bird began to get pretty restless, I had been holding him for a
long time, so they were kind enough to bring us a little carrier
that I could put him in. Eventually we arrived at the examining table
and I was really happy to hear that they
would be able to mend his wing after all.
Furthermore, they had a rehabilitation program they could put him in. That was
great! He would be taken care of by professionals and he would be returned to
the wild (I have always found Bangkok kind of wild, lots of laughs.) Now the
only question was how much was this going to cost me? Nothing, they told me, but I was
welcome to make a donation to their rehabilitation program. When
I asked about it they suggested that most people usually donated about 1,000 baht. I was
actually relieved to contribute 1,000 baht to their cause. That
seemed so much a better solution than looking after him for the
rest of his life. I walked out of the clinic excited that my endangered dove would
soon fly again. |
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