Life on Hoth (DC Can’t Handle Snow)
Another dusting of snow, another out of proportion reaction from the DC area. At least this time people stopped short of bartering their women for milk and toilet paper, but, […]
I have a cat (there’s something inherently creepy about a heterosexual male saying that, but bear with me). It craps in a box, lives on a pillow under the heater, only intermittently shows any interest in me and, every few years, costs me several hundred dollars at the vet. But that cat is the Rolls-Royce of animal companionship compared to the AMC Gremlin that is the gerbil.
Most kids go through a gerbil phase, typically in early elementary school where there’s a heavy preponderance of rodentia as classroom pets. Mine came around that time, approximately 1990. (I’m deducing 1990 the fact I named my male gerbils Joe Montana, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bart Simpson, the pillars of my childhood masculine world.) In no particular order, here are some of my favorite (mostly bad) memories from those years:
-Learning about sex through Joe Montana “fighting” with his cagemate Jessica, repeatedly hopping on her from behind and making her squeal in what I thought was pain.
-My horror after deducing that Jessica was eating her young as they disappeared, one by one, like Dutch Schaefer‘s men in the jungles of Val Verde.
-Being morbidly fascinated with the fact that gerbils had fur everywhere except their nads, which were jet black and easily as long as their massive hind feet.
-Shoving one of my female gerbils, Bouncy (sounds like a stripper), into the VCR, where she proceeded to gnaw through every wire within 10 minutes, totaling the unit.
-Changing their soiled cage shavings weekly, then bi-weekly, then finally every other month or so, at which point I could pull out the entire congealed mess like a brick of ramen.
Gerbils are fine as long as you’re a preteen (or into some Habitrail-in-your-ass Richard Gere hijinks, I suppose). Own them beyond that age, though, and you’re probably going to turn into Mark David Chapman. It’s science.
Lisa on June 5, 2012
Gerbils are very intelligent creatures, they bond, and are very responsive to their primary handler. For one Jessica wouldn’t have canabalized her young if she wasn’t stressed. She should have been left alone with her young in a quiet, dimly lit place for at least a week. As for “Bouncy” ruining your VCR, you have no one to blame but your dumb ass self. Lastly, Gerbils only need their cage cleaned once a month and if their cage was that bad at the end of the month you probably had too small of a cage or too many gerbils in it.
I would also like to point out that cats are not the most wonderful pets. I’ve worked with and handled a lot of cats in my career and very few of them were friendly or in any way loving.
It is absolutely ridiculous to say that any pet is lame (even a fish) because you were a shitty owner and had some bad experiences with it. You’re the lame one since you have nothing better to blog about but your shitty abilities as a pet owner.