Get a pet, they* said. It will be good for them.
So we did it.
We bought the kids two female guinea pigs and an outdoor
hutch.
I used to have guinea pigs growing up so I’m all over this
shit. I like the weird noises they make, they are totally low maintenance and
cost next to nothing as they mainly eat all the vegetables you buy from the
January health-kick-rush-of-blood-to-the-head and then keep in the fridge until
they smell like a compost bin.
The kids named them Snuffles** and Bella and they were due
to live outside and rub along with us with minimal disruption.
Until hurricane Brenda or whichever one it was started to
blow a gale and I realised that the guinea pigs would die of hyperthermia
before they reached their 2-month birthday.
So we moved the massive hutch inside.
Not ideal but two clicks later and I’d bought an indoor
hutch on-line. This was starting to be a slightly more pricey endeavour than
the occasional bag of hay and pet food but hey ho, it might be easier to look
after them/ harder to ignore them, if they are just at the bottom of the stairs
so we have to breathe in to squeeze past them every time.
The new hutch arrived.
It’s huge.
And the outdoor hutch went outside again, the children declaring
it’s their holiday home ‘like Pontins.’ Perfect.
The first thing I noticed now they’re inside is how fucking noisy
they are.
And nocturnal.
They reach optimum squeak at about 3am.
Never mind.
We’ll get used to the noise I tell myself. We might even
start to not notice it at all; they will just become part of the house.
They start to grow. Like really quickly.
These guinea pigs are gigantic. I don’t remember them being
this big when I was a child.
And then we realise why.
‘Mummy, Snufffles has shrunk!’
I look in the hutch.
No she hasn’t.
That’s a baby.
And there are two more.
Bella was pregnant when we bought her it turns out. We have five guinea pigs for the price of two.
And the massive hutch doesn’t look so massive now.
We plan to find homes for the babies, but after Ben referred
to them as ‘family’ we couldn’t do it.
We couldn’t split up ‘the girls.’
When did we start calling them ‘the girls’? Kill me now.
But one trip to the petshop later confirmed that they are
indeed all girls and so the chances of them procreating further are biblical.
Come Christmas and the kids are putting together their
unrealistic lists of things they’d like to appear under the tree, and we’re
trying to convince them that perhaps what they’d really like is a gigantic
guinea pig hutch.
A double decker, two story, block of flats style hutch.
Done.
They’re both slightly disappointed but it’s the only way we
can keep them all.
So what started out as a lovely exercise in empathy and
looking after another creature has become a quick lesson in teenage pregnancy
and incest.
You can’t win them all.
*The voice in my head and Yahoo news.
** I have never met a creature who is less like her name.
She bites. And if you look at her straight on she reminds me a bit of General
Wooundwort from Watership Down.
You're good parents. When my dad got us hamsters - my mum took them back to the pet shop. Majorly traumatic when you're 6 years old. We've ended up with a new cat by accident. He turned up on our doorstep before Christmas and no owner could be traced so he's stayed - with everyone commenting how therapeutic it will be after my hip op next week. All I'm thinking is how much the house is going to stink of cat poo whilst my hip is out of action and all the litter tray jobs fall to the rest of the household to do. Wish us luck!
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