A green tree frog in Australia was air-lifted nearly 800 miles to receive medical treatment after a woman accidentally ran over it with her lawnmower. Felicia Morgan coordinated to have the frog flown from Mount Isa to Cairns after her aunt Min Tims called her, devastated by the accident. Deborah Pergolotti, president of Frog Safe frog hospital in Cairns said the frog was fortunate the two women had the initiative to seek care for the animal and said it was recovering well. Photo by Andrew Lam/Shutterstock
MOUNT ISA, Australia, June 7 (UPI) -- An Australian woman went to extraordinary measures to care for a frog after she accidentally ran over it with her lawn mower.
Min Tim’s ran over the green tree frog while mowing her lawn and subsequently contacted her niece Felicia Morgan and told The Brisbane times that she asked her to "say prayers" for the frog.
"She had rung me up devastated because she was mowing the lawn and didn't see the frog that was underneath and he got clipped behind his head," Morgan said.
The two women then came together and attempted to care for the frog by treating its wound with gauze from a first aid kit.
After attempting to patch up the wound, Tim’s and Morgan contacted Deborah Pergolotti, president of Frog Safe frog hospital in Cairns.
"I knew we were going to save him because he was a little fighter to begin with, he survived the first night," Morgan said.
The women coordinated with Pergolotti to have the frog, properly packaged, flown about 800 miles to the hospital in Cairns.
"The only thing that we could do to help this lady in Mount Isa was to get the frog to Cairns," Pergolotti told ABC News. "That started a big bureaucratic process of finding out which airlines now had the contract to service Mount Isa and Cairns, contacting them, and then they had to contact their animal handling people."
After passing through airport security and receiving assistance from three different businesses, including a free flight, the frog arrived in Cairns to receive treatment.
"As we were recovering the injury and getting all that cleaned up we discovered he had some internal parasites so that might have made him ill enough to be out on the lawn to begin with during the daylight hours," Pergolotti said.
She added that most people don't consider that frogs can receive treatment and said the frog was fortunate that Tim’s and Morgan went to such lengths to care for it.
"He is an extremely lucky animal to have survived being run over by basically a blender on wheels and we paid a huge amount of attention to him but he has recovered very well," she said.
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