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When I was eight, my parents bought me two gerbils who were my first two pets ever. I was so excited. While my dad was setting up their cage, my parents let me sit on the bathroom floor and let the gerbils run around while their new home was being set up. Everything was totally fine for a few minutes. They scampered around, chewed some wood blocks, ate some treats out of my hand....until one of them dropped dead. I still have a very vivid memory of my mom holding the lifeless little body and trying to massage it back to life while my dad was on the phone with the pet store. I felt so guilty, like I was personally responsible for its heart exploding from excitement.  The store held off on closing for the evening so we could come back and get a replacement, who I named Shenzi and ended up living like a stupid long time for a gerbil, like four years or something. Kind of an opposite story: a few years later, my parents decided my younger sister was finically Old Enough for a pet, so my mom bought her a baby Angora rabbit on an impulse. Within a few months, it got to be larger than our cats, and my sister got tired of/overwhelmed with taking care of it. It pooped, it stunk, and it was banished to living in a dog crate in the basement where it lived alone making GBS threads on itself and never having any interaction with people. After about six months of living like this, my mom took it to "live on a farm with lots of other bunnies." I always felt awful about it, like I could have helped this bunny more than I did. Many, many years passed, and it came up one day in conversation with my mom. I asked her frankly, "C'mon, Mom...what really happened to that rabbit?" She was like, "  What do you mean? Your aunt [who is/was heavily involved in animal welfare and rescue] knew someone through work who worked with a small animal rescue and she took that rabbit to live with her. She had her spayed and as far as I know, she's still around!"
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Jun 24, 2015 01:46
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 07:12 |
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