Here at Braj Animal Care, we aim to improve the lives of all animals, no matter what their size, condition or perceived value may be. One day in the middle of a Vrindavan winter, we received a call from someone who told us that they had found a rat with a broken leg and asked if we could help.
Because we had never had such a small patient before, we didn’t have any kind of specialised equipment for such a challenge. The volunteer, Vishakha, who received the call improvised by cutting up a bandage into tiny strips and collecting some matchsticks that might possibly be used as a splint. However, when Vishakha got to the patient, she discovered that he wasn’t a rat at all but a baby mouse, whom we named Bubbles.
Bubbles’s leg was indeed injured; luckily though it wasn’t bad enough to warrant a splint or even a bandage. The main danger that Bubbles faced was the risk of hypothermia and Vishakha could see that he was very weak. Baby mice like Bubbles rely heavily on the body heat of their mothers to stay warm, and it looked like Bubbles was completely alone.
Vishakha swaddled Bubbles in pieces of cloth and placed him in a basket before taking him back to her home, where she placed him near the space heater. Bubbles enjoyed being fed crumbs and water droplets through a tiny dropper, and soon he became stronger and healthier. After about ten days, Bubbles had grown to the size of an adult mouse and was ready to go back into the wild. At Braj Animal Care, it is our intention to return our animal friends to the best possible environments for them, so we found a field on the outskirts of Vrindavan and bid farewell to our littlest patient.