poor bill #2

You know, Bill has not had an easy life thus far. He gets his tail cut off, a metal tag put in his ear, he's carted across the country, carried around by his back legs, dumped into a dog carrier, and then taken to this weird place with a bunch of strange people and dogs running around.

He's been doing better, though. He has been letting us rub his belly, following us around, and getting into a bit of trouble, but not much. He seems to have accepted that he is not allowed in the dog house, because I haven't caught him in there for the last few days. That doesn't mean he isn't in there when I'm not home, but if he is, he hears the car and takes off. Plus his poop is not so runny.

We finished the turkey coop, and bill has found that the sand in the barn is really great for eating, pooping, and rolling around in. It's cool, the bugs pretty much stay away, and he gets to look at the chickens and eat their poop if they happen to let loose on the chicken fence. So I have to think that, at least for a while, Bill was finally feeling pretty good about his life.

Until today. I found him in the turkey coop, locked in because he insisted on shutting the door behind him (I still can't figure out why he does that), with his ear half torn off and blood all over the place. Somewhere he had gotten his tag stuck and he pulled it out of his ear, taking a lot of the ear with it. It looks pretty bad. I think he was pretty shook up, because he actually laid down and let me clean him off a bit. It must have just happened because it was still bleeding pretty badly. It took a while, but it finally stopped. Hopefully he will be ok, because I'm not really sure what to do about it. I tried to put a bandage on it but that lasted about 1 second.

He didn't want to go in his pen afterwards, and ate a bunch of grass, so I'm thinking that's a good sign. Bad news is that he has the runs again. Just like that. You know, he isn't that different from humans. Ever get into a stressful situation and immediately get the runs? Yep, so does Bill. Except that his really stinks badly. So we'll see how he does tomorrow. Maybe this crisis will make him trust us more since we were giving him lots of attention. I think he's starting to like it.