The Very Valuable Vet

A lot of people say that they love animals. I am one of those people. Iook at the commercials on TV with the cats and dogs in the pound, and I start to cry. Or maybe that's just because of the spicy chips and salsa that I eat when I watch TV. I do know one person who really cares about animals, though. My uncle Oliver. He lives about three blocks away from me, so he visits often. He works as a vet at an animal hospital. He has a few pets of his own, too, so he knows a lot about animals.When I was younger, he used to go with me to the zoo as often as he could. He was a vet then, too. We would point out the animals and pretend that we were in their natural habitat, whether it was with penguins in Antarctica or giraffes in the Savannah. We had so much fun just using our imagination. That all changed because of one event. We went to the zoo on a Saturday one week. When we got there, I sensed that something was wrong. Nobody was at the lion exhibit, and it was already crowded over there. Uncle Ollie and I continued to walk around the zoo until we heard a large commotion. It was near the bird exhibit. We made our way through the crowd to the front, and I gasped. Surrounded by dozens of zookeepers was a bird with a severely damaged wing and foot. The weird thing was that it was a pigeon, not even one of the birds people go to see at the zoo.

"Stay here, Heather. I'll be right back, okay?" my uncle told me.

I nodded silently and watched as he went up to the zookeepers and helped them with the bird. My uncle came back to me after he finished with a triumphant smile.

"We did it. We saved the bird," he told me.

Since then, the bird exhibit read the first one we went to when we visited the zoo, and we paid attention to reality. Every so often, though, we made a trip back to Antarctica with the penguins or to the Savannah with the giraffes, or even to the rainforest with the birds.