Cocoa is my older daughter’s bunny. He has followed a long line of furry creatures to our house behind this particular child. It began in preschool. My first mistake was to agree to take the class chinchilla home for Christmas vacation many years ago. It turns out chinchillas aren’t really good pets for preschool age children. They are nocturnal for starters, which means they aren’t exactly in an interactive mood during the day, when small children are awake. The teacher thought we might want Cuddles (a misnomer if there ever was one) for keeps since he had “such a good time” with us over break. My daughter had assured this teacher in many previous conversations that I would be thrilled, and that I had already “practically agreed.” She was fairly persuasive for a four year old. I’m pretty sure I was still in a sleep-deprived coma because somehow Cuddles came home with us in his wire cage, a bag of his food and a can of dust (for bathing) quickly thrust in a bag by the teacher, before I changed my mind.
Cuddles was with us for four or five years, spent mostly in his cage sleeping or cleaning himself in inappropriate ways that had my husband agog. He was at his most entertaining for the kids and I when we poured dust into a roasting pan and watched him roll around in it. He would run around the kitchen, leaping over our legs, ricocheting off walls like a cartoon superhero. He was never tame, but if you stayed very very still he would come near and you could almost pet him. His fur was very soft, obviously. He died naturally of old age. We were living in a rental house at the time due to a remodel, and our neighbors (a family with two kids similar ages to mine) felt so badly for us when Cuddles died, that the Mom took all the kids on an expedition to Denny’s Pet World to replace him. Several hours later they returned, with a young chinchilla. Two out of the four kids needed band aids on their fingers where the new chinchilla had bitten them on the drive home, obviously from sticking their fingers into his cage. The chinchilla never warmed up to the kids, and had diarrhea from the moment he arrived. My daughter called Denny’s Pet World to discuss these issues. She was nine or ten years old then. After hanging up, she said, “Mom, we have to take him back. He’s stressed.” “Really,” I said, without inflection. The other Mom, feeling responsible for acquiring an unsatisfying pet, loaded the kids up and drove back to Denny’s Pet World with the beleaguered chinchilla. I spent another few blissful child-free hours wondering why we actually needed to “replace” anything. But when they returned, tumbling out of the car they shouted, “Look! Look! We got a ferret!”
I knew nothing about ferrets. Not that I knew anything about chinchillas either, but Cuddles had been weaned by preschoolers. As my daughter approached I could see something long and furry wrapped around her neck that I could smell from twenty yards. “Her name is Babycakes,” she said. “We all agreed. We’re going to share her, but she’s going to live at our house.” She had a book tucked under her arm called Ferrets For Dummies, and began reciting the positive pet attributes of ferrets to me while dictating unloading instructions to the other kids. She was worried I might overrule the other Mom’s decision, and I was thinking about it, especially when I saw the size of the cage. It was gi-normous, a veritable gym compared to other rodent abodes I’d seen or owned. But Babycakes turned out to be a gem of a pet, sweet and affectionate, and though the kids went to school “smelling like homeless people”, according to my husband, she lived up to her first billing. Baby was playful and funny and went on walks with the dogs and us in her leopard colored harness. She bounded down the street in her funny U shape, causing jaws to drop in people driving by. In fact once when I’d walked the kids to school and was on my way home with the dogs and the ferret on leashes, and the cat following ten paces behind pretending she didn’t know us, a woman I recognized from school stopped her car, rolled down her window and asked, “What is this? Dr. Doolittle does Seattle?”
Baby died of cancer a few years later, and though she was sorely missed by all but my husband, my daughter began work in earnest lobbying for her next pet, a rabbit. Our landscaper conveniently happened to have one left out of a litter that his daughter bred for 4H, four months old and already dog savvy. We had resisted our daughter’s pleas for months, but at Christmas we decided to get her the bunny, worn down at last. She promptly named him Cocoa, for his coloring. He’s not very big, which is a relief. And though he still doesn’t come when called or seek out affection like Baby, he is very soft and he doesn’t smell, and therefore his cage is in the kitchen. That means that every time I open the fridge he gets cilantro and baby carrots, or lettuce, bits of broccoli or celery (but not too much because it gives him diarrhea). When I’m out of town, he lives on pellets and hay because nobody remembers to feed him. I can’t stand to see him stuck in his cage for long so I let him out at least once a day. When the weather is good he goes outside. I don’t like to leave him inside anymore because I had all the carpets cleaned and he refuses to use his litter box even if I put it out, and pees on the carpet. The dogs follow him around and eat his poop pellets, but his pee is a pain to clean every day. He used to spray occasionally when he was feeling frisky, as he wasn’t neutered, but when we got Charlie as a puppy he would try and hump her, as they were close to the same size at the time. Amusing as that was for the kids, I took him to the Exotic Bird and Pet Clinic and had him fixed. My regular vet wouldn’t do it. “I don’t do rodents,” he said. Now Cocoa hops around, digs in the rose beds and eats my impatiens, occasionally charging Charlie aggressively when she annoys him. He’s escaped to the back garden several times and once we lost him overnight. I was worried he was a goner because we
have raccoons, cats, and even coyotes in our neighborhood, but my daughter found him under his favorite bush by the front gate the next morning. Thank goodness because I’d already lost the turtle by then.
留言