An Anteater on my Street?
This afternoon, just as I was opening my gate, in order to back my car out of the driveway, I saw a very odd little animal limping down the street towards me. At first I thought it was a coati, which is a raccoon-size mammal that is very common here, but it had the wrong markings and the wrong snout for that. I finally figured out that it was an anteater.
But our house is smack in the middle of Cancun? Where in the world did this creature come from I wondered?
When we looked closer we saw that it had an injury to one of it’s front wrists and couldn’t put weight on that leg. But the strange thing was that it had a bandage around the upper part of that injured front leg. So clearly we were not it’s first human encounter.
The poor thing was thirsty and settled down to drink from a pool of water in front of our house. Being that we can’t handle not helping every single injured animal that comes our way we quickly got the cat carrier and began stalking the injured anteater. The little guy was kind of tame and was even curious about the carrier; he stuck his nose in there a little, so my husband was able to just push his little anteater butt and he went right in. Then we put a bowl of water in there with him.
After capturing the anteater we needed to decide what to do with him. One of our two favorite vets has an office within walking distance. But before calling her we decided to talk to the guard on our street, who is paid to know who belongs where (and especially who doesn’t belong). Well it turned out that the guard DID know where the anteater belonged. The anteater had escaped from the home of a yet another vet, who is one of our neighbors. We should have guessed this in the first place since that house always has cages with all manner of exotic animals stacked around in the front yard.
So my husband took the anteater back to the vet’s house. We breathed a sigh of relief that the little guy had someone to take care of him. And thus ended our brief anteater encounter.
