Dr. Doolittle has nothing on this pet owner
Almost every family has had pets at one time or another.  Our family is no exception.  Of course, we had dogs and cats.  We had one of the world’s smartest dogs and one of the world’s dumbest cats.  You have read about our genius-dog Moses who, among other self-taught accomplishments, could let himself out and ring the doorbell to be let in.

We had other pets as well.  I do not consider as pets the kindergarten parakeet that died while we were caring for him over the Christmas holiday or the lizard Bill caught at YMCA day camp that starved to death because we could not catch enough live flies, the only thing he would eat.

 When the children were in elementary school, we finally relented to persistent pleas and bought a gerbil and a hamster. I bought a cage for the hamster, but I used a small, cracked aquarium for the gerbil.  I reasoned that nothing could climb those vertical, smooth glass walls.  He escaped the first night. 

Cathy checked on her new pet at 3 AM, found him missing, woke her mother who kicked me out of bed, threatening me with severe bodily harm if that gerbil remained a fugitive.

Even though Carolyn weighed only 100 pounds, I was afraid to test her resolve when I saw that steely look in her eyes.  I found the gerbil in the far corner of a closet, put him back in his aquarium, covered it with a heavy book and slipped back into bed.  I made a hardware cloth cover for the aquarium that afternoon.

A few weeks later, Carolyn took a weekend sabbatical with her buddies at Red Boiling Springs, a nearby old resort, where they played bridge for 12 hours a day.  Cathy took her gerbil out of his cage to play with him.  He tried to escape and Cathy grabbed him by his tail.  The furry tuft came off in her hand and I had to chase him down again, bloody tail and all.

A quick exam revealed about a half inch of exposed tailbone. If bone were left uncovered it would become infected ultimately leading to the gerbil’s demise.  Amputation was the only solution.

 We held the gerbil on Carolyn’s cutting board at the kitchen sink.  I retracted tail skin about an inch and then snipped off the bone with Carolyn’s sewing scissors.  When I pulled the skin back down, it covered the remaining bone nicely.  A few sutures in the skin with Carolyn’s sewing needle and thread completed the procedure.

“Let’s not mentioned this to Mama,” I suggested.

It took Carolyn only minutes to detect traces of gerbil blood on the cutting board, the sink and the scissors.  She was not pleased.

The gerbil survived and seemed never to have missed the tuft on his tail.

The hamster survived despite indifferent care.  Bill changed the shavings in the cage much too infrequently, resulting in a chronically smelly cage.  Finally, we moved the cage to a half bath just off the door to the garage. 

The first wintertime cold front brought with it a freezing night.  The next morning the hamster lay, stiff and cold on the floor of his cage.  It was a sad day in the Fleet household. 

We delayed burial until late afternoon to allow me to go to work and the children to go to school. Carolyn lined a box with flannel and I dug a hole in a flowerbed.  We buried the hamster in his little coffin just at dark and stood in a cold misty rain while Bill played a sad song on his flute.  We had our closure.  I was secretly glad.  We had buried a nuisance.

That summer, I related the hamster story to my sister.  Her children had kept gerbils, hamsters, mice and other varmints.  My sister asked, “Was it unusually cold the night he died?”

“It sure was.”

“That hamster wasn’t dead.  He was hibernating.  Ours used to do that often.” 

I thought, “Well he’s dead now.”

And then there were rabbits.  Our children persuaded us to buy white rabbits as pets.  Like our calico, we seemed never to learn.  Undomesticated animals usually do not make good pets.

I built a wire pen and a small shelter for our two new animals.  Unfortunately, one was male and one was female and they began to reproduce like — well — rabbits.  Before long the pen contained six or more white bunnies.  (It was impossible to get an accurate count because they had honeycombed the pen with tunnels, making it look like a World War I no man’s land. I never could be sure how many bunnies were underground.)

One night a neighbor’s hound climbed into the pen.  The next morning, the dog sat in the pen surrounded by dead rabbits.  I know dogs cannot smile but he seemed to be doing just that.  I could tell he was extremely proud of his night’s work.

I let the dog out, picked up the dead rabbits and, once again, felt more relief than grief.

The pen lay dormant, displaying not a single sign of life for three days.  Then, as I left for work, I saw two long white ears protruding from one of the tunnels.  They looked like a large, white, furry “V”.

I doubt it was a victory sign.  Perhaps it was a peace sign.  I thought, “Maybe I can borrow our neighbor’s hound dog tonight.”

Retired pediatrician Bill Fleet now spends his days working with wood (“mostly making sawdust”), fishing (“but not very well”), puttering around his garden and writing. He has lived in Brentwood since 1974. Click here to read his recent columns. You can contact him at bfleet1@comcast.net.