I don't know if this is exactly what you had in mind, but I shot some photos at the Boston MFA Chihuly exhibit earlier this month that were all done at ISO 2000. I find this website kind of a pain to post photos on, but I have a small gallery of those photos available here:
http://www.dpreview.com/galleries/63...A562A52A73675C You can view the photos at 100% resolution by selecting "Original" on the photos you'd like to see up close and personal. I don't take a lot of animal photos, and don't have any readily available at high ISO. But perhaps the Chihuly photos will give you a sense of what my processing looks like on high ISO images. I don't have any "before" photos uploaded, so it may be hard to get a sense of what was removed without that. If you feel that something like that would help, I should be able to upload one or two that you might want to see "blemishes and all" if you'd let me know which ones to bother with. But, basically, all unprocessed images look pretty much the same when it comes to noise and the like.
[ETA: I should explain why all the photos were shot at ISO 2000. Some of them could have been shot at a considerably lower ISO. But I am kind of a nervous event shooter, and try to eliminate as many choices as possible for such shoots. I can shoot just about anything at that ISO -- even though some of the really dark images had shutter speeds as low as 1/20s, I could get away with that here. And I just plain screw up too many shots if I am faced with too many degrees of freedom in an anxiety-inducing setting. I didn't want you to think that I was recommending such a high ISO when it wasn't needed -- it was to accomodate my failings, not because it was photographically ideal.]