Country star Brad Paisley would do anything for his kids. And that includes emergency dental surgery on a pufferfish.
The musician wound up spending a lot more time at his family’s farm outside Nashville after the coronavirus pandemic hit and his tour got canceled. And while he was hanging around at home with his wife, actress Kimberly Williams-Paisley, and sons Jasper and Huck, he realized that one of Jasper’s two remaining pufferfish was shedding pounds.
“My son had four pufferfish and was down to two — and this one was losing weight,” Paisley told People magazine this week.
Brad Paisley to the Rescue
Most fish teeth stop growing eventually, according to PetMD. But pufferfish are a different story. Particularly if they’re not being fed food with hard shells to trim their teeth naturally, their teeth just keep growing.
As it turns out, if left untended, pufferfish teeth can grow too long and prevent them from eating. And this particular pufferfish needed its teeth trimmed.
“Brad was looking up YouTube videos to find out what to do,” Williams-Paisley told People. He figured out that if you add several drops of clove oil to a bucket of water, it puts the fish to sleep.
“You put him in the bucket, and he started to drift and go sideways, so I grabbed him in the net and held him,” Paisley recounted. Then Paisley took out his clippers.
“I’ve never seen him nervous before, but his hand was shaking,” Williams-Paisley said.
Indeed, Paisley at one point called a friend of his who’s a brain surgeon and asked if it was normal for his hand to shake like that. But finally, he buckled down and got to it.
“They’ve got like a beak,” Paisley told People. “And I clipped it and thought I killed him – but he made it!”
The Couple Cares for an Expanding Menagerie
Those pufferfish aren’t the only creatures entrusted to Paisley’s care. He and Williams-Paisley – but mostly, they agreed, Paisley – also look after two dogs, snakes, a bearded dragon and fresh goose eggs.
“All of which belong to someone other than me, and who takes care of them?” Paisley asked rhetorically.
“He cares about everything, great and small,” Williams-Paisley said of her husband.
Paisley even cares about the goose eggs, which were damaged by a recent heavy rain that flooded their farm.
“He goes to great lengths to protect them,” Williams-Paisley said. “Brad ran out at two in the morning to see if the goose eggs were OK.”
It’s all in a day’s work for the amateur veterinarian and Grammy Award-winning country singer.
