Poppy is a 1 yr old kangaroo we just took in with broken feet that is going to need surgery and long term care. As far as we can tell she was born and kept in a space too small for a growing kangaroo to develop properly, thus she had never been able to run and let her tendons and ligaments learn to stretch fully. She was then purchased and shipped to a second location where she was given more space with other kangaroos. Once in this larger space she became a normal active youngster and began to run but since those tendons and ligaments had never learned to stretch as they should have, due to the confinement of that small space in her development time, the first time she was able to run and did, her heel bones broke away from the major foot bones and are now floating freely in her heel tissue.-
That is when the call came in to us and we chose to accept her and take on the costs and care.-The only fix for this is a surgical procedure to pin the heel bone back to the foot bone on each foot. Once the bones have heeled back together and the pins are surgically removed, we will rehab her with physical therapy for several months to teach those tendons and ligaments to stretch and protect and eventually she will be able to live freely with our mob of roos, and with some limits, have a 'normal in captivity' life. We have her scheduled for surgery next Tuesday & we will know more then. The expenses of her medical and rehab care will be somewhere between $4000 and $6000. Since we just needed to spend $7800 for replacement of three of our existing macropod (wallaby, walleroo, and kangaroo) huts, as they had far outlived their life as safe structures for eating and weather protection, we need to raise funds to help with this youngster's medical needs.
We accepted her knowing the costs and significant human time that would be involved, but chose to help knowing euthanasia was the only other option she had, and because we CAN help her. We have the knowledge and the ability for her aftercare and rehab on site, and felt her quality of life was worth working for. We will have a two part fundraiser on gulfcoastgives.com: Part 1 to help raise funds for her surgery & Part 2 to help pay for her long term care after surgery. We need to raise funds and spend the time and labor to try because it IS WHAT WE DO HERE. Please help Poppy have a normal happy Kangaroo life. If you would like to donate to Poppy's care please visit our website at : www.majicalminiatures.org/donate.html and click on the donate button
