Pets are a great way to teach kids about responsibility. At best, pets live long and happy lives becoming like family members. At worst, they live short, tragi-comical lives and cause all kinds of trouble. Most families take a pet, but not all should. My family has always been a magnet for all sorts of pet-related mishaps, and I feel it’s time to air out the dirty laundry. Here is the chronicle of our pet catastrophes. My first pet was a gerbil named Sarah. In fact all three of us siblings received our own pet gerbils: two girls and one boy. Small, quiet, low maintenance is what my parents thought when agreeing to purchase those puffy-cheeked, jumpy rodents. But as we found out, nothing could have been further from the truth. They were kept in two separate cages but behind our parents' backs we would move the boy, Vilperi, from his solitary confinement in with the girls. We felt sorry for the poor bugger, all alone in his bachelor pad and saw no cause for concern with these occasional conjugal visits.
It didn’t take long for the family of three to begin growing exponentially.
There were baby gerbils shooting out left and right. We were ecstatic! Pink and wrinkly little things at first, but covered with a beautiful layer of soft fur within a few weeks. They melted our hearts scurrying through the cage, whiskers quivering. We couldn’t get enough of the babies, and that was the problem.
Gerbil mamas take threats seriously. The stress of a possible threat to their young sends them into a frenzy. At the first sign of danger they go into destruction mode sinking their teeth into the necks of the babies and effectively ending their short lives. Us kids squealing with excitement and picking the babies up from the cage were pretty much the ultimate threats, and our dream of an ever-growing gerbil family quickly turned into a bloody massacre. After the gerbil fiasco of 1996 we didn’t buy new pets for quite a while. We all needed time to heal.
Some years down the line we moved to the Middle East where pet stores we filled with exotic birds and reptiles. The gerbil fiasco had left scars, we’d sworn rodents off indefinitely, and so we opted for three tiny snapping turtles and two budgies. The turtles lived in a low terrarium, up on the third shelf of a bookcase in my siblings’ room. We quickly learned that these were no cuddly pets. Their necks stretched out backwards over their shells to bite anyone who dared to pick them up. They had mean eyes and surprisingly quick reflexes. It was a mistake to buy them. Nonetheless, we kept them, fed them and thought they had a pretty good life up on the third shelf. Little did we know, those ninja turtles began planning an escape the day we brought them home.
One by one they made a crawl for it. The first one disappeared a couple months in and was later retrieved from the bathtub, which stood half a meter off the ground. How he’d gotten there? We never did find out. The second snapper disappeared not long after that. He escaped without a trace: a cold case. Four years after the mysterious disappearance we made a startling discovery. An unidentifiable round shell-like thing was found behind the bookcase in my siblings’ room. It was a turtle skeleton.
Alongside the turtles, we also had two budgies. We didn’t have any better luck with birds. The original ones, Leaf and Snowball, became the first of a whole dynasty of birds. Apparently budgies don’t do too well in 40-degree heat, so a couple of them died of heat exhaustion. Others found an open window during their “free flying” time and never returned. With every new death or escape, bitter tears were cried and heart-wrenching eulogies were written to the point that my parents decided birds probably weren’t the right fit for us.
With so many bad experiences under our belts, you’d think we would eventually just stop getting pets. But we didn’t. Since there were no birds in the house anymore, my sister decided she wanted cat. So for her birthday my dad went out to the market where kittens were sold in cardboard boxes (animal rights: not a thing in the Middle East) and brought home the most gorgeous blue-eyed, grey cat. My sister called her Cloud. The name was a doom prophecy if there ever was one. Cloud grew up to be a severely disturbed cat, most likely because she’d been taken from her mother and the rest of the litter just a few days post birth. While she was with us, she raised all kinds of hell, lunging at anything and everything. We’d put her on the balcony to calm down, where she’d defiantly sit on the balcony ledge. After half a year or so it became too difficult to control her and we gave her away to a nice family who thought they could handle her. Cloud, taking her name too literally, jumped off the third floor balcony. She must have had some lives left though, because she survived with two broken back legs.
Rodents, reptiles, birds, and felines we had failed them all. It had been over 10 years since the gerbil fiasco and we thought we were ready to give rodents another shot. Friends of ours were moving abroad and needed a home for their two elderly (and chubby) guinea pigs. Those fellows were cute, especially when stuffing their cheeks with grub. And they loved their food. In our overbearing care they put on a little too much, a little too fast. Before you had time to say: “wow those guinea pigs are fat”, they’d become so hefty, they couldn’t stand on their little tiny feet anymore. Friends would come over and ask what’s wrong with our guinea pigs, and we’d have to reassure them that they are alive, but just too fat to move. This was the final nail in the coffin. The gerbil fiasco of 1996, the case of the missing turtle, the dynasty of budgies, the suicidal cat, and now the obese guinea pigs: we really didn’t need any more evidence of how unfit we were to be pet owners. We were done. We’ve never owned pets since, and it’s probably best for all parties involved.
