(no subject)
Jul. 21st, 2024 11:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vr_trakowskiWhen I was little, I had a couple of British books about guinea pigs - the Olga da Polga series, and Guinea-Pig Podge, with the wonderful illustrations. Our gerbil, Alphonse, passed away when I was still quite small, and eventually I started pestering for a guinea pig.
The trouble was that - at the time - they weren’t generally available where we lived. This was decades before the rise of the mega pet store, and they simply weren’t sold locally. I’m not sure they were sold in many places in the United States then, not as pets.
My father worked for the Food and Drug Administration, on the drug side. One evening he put me in the car and drove me out to a parking lot somewhere. We met up with a man, who handed me a cardboard box. In the box was an albino guinea pig. The whole event resembled nothing so much as a drug deal.
(Dad, at this late date, no longer remembers who or where. Obviously she was a retired lab pig, but all other data has vanished into the past.)
I named her Gwenyth, for reasons I won’t explain. Compared to the current standards of care for guinea pigs, we housed her atrociously - and solo - but honestly we didn’t know better. All I had to go on was an old British book on guinea-pig care, which mostly presumed they would be kept in outdoor hutches. There was no Internet.
However, she didn’t seem to mind. She was an excellent pig, and was fed very well at least - pellets and hay, vitamin C in her water, and heaps and heaps of vegetable and fruit scraps and dandelion leaves. When the weather was mild she was occasionally taken out to graze on the lawn, under an overturned box to prevent dashes into the azalea bushes; the box would edge gradually across the grass, revealing a neatly shorn patch. A rock could be placed on top to prevent movement, but then the inhabitant (we did this also with later pigs) would go back and trim the grass down to the ground.
She was never what I would call a cuddler, but didn’t protest being held, and enjoyed the occasional waddle around the living room. She and our second pig, Cinnamon, also knew precisely the sound of the fridge door opening, and would make their intolerable starvation known. Shrilly.
I think she lived about six years in our house, after an unknown period as a lab animal. She came down with something and stopped eating, and my mother mixed up a slurry of ground pellets, milk, and something else, and force-fed her with a dropper until she recovered. (There were no vets available that would treat a small animal, and even if there were, my parents would not have spent the money.) The second time Gwenyth got sick, it didn’t work; but she’d had a pretty long life by then.
Somewhere, I still have a photo of Gwenyth on a table on a spread-out newspaper, all blurred light and ruby eyes from the flash, with a little dish of revoltingly green slurry and a dropper, and my mother seated there...and our cat, seated in my mother’s lap, with her nose in the dish. Rose had a strange passion for mushed-up alfalfa pellets, which was hilarious.
There’s no point to this story. Gwenyth just came to mind, and I like to remember her, her pink and white livery, her placidity, her food shrieks (wwwwhhhhhEEEEET! wwwwhhhhhEEEEET! whheet whheet whheet WWHHHEEEEETTT!), the contented, industrious munch of a cavy with a pile of greenery to get through. The crisp sound of lettuce, the scrush of apple bits, the harder crunch of carrots, the way one could feed a dandelion through the cage bars and watch it steadily vanish like a ticker tape in reverse. That particular woody rodent smell. The absolute softness of her ears. Her tiny tender feet with their delicate little nails. The way her fur slicked over her rump to showcase the absolute lack of tail. The ridiculousness of a yawn and stretch.
A small life whose entire being was focused on “what delicious thing will land in my cage today?”
She was a good pig. I remember her.
The trouble was that - at the time - they weren’t generally available where we lived. This was decades before the rise of the mega pet store, and they simply weren’t sold locally. I’m not sure they were sold in many places in the United States then, not as pets.
My father worked for the Food and Drug Administration, on the drug side. One evening he put me in the car and drove me out to a parking lot somewhere. We met up with a man, who handed me a cardboard box. In the box was an albino guinea pig. The whole event resembled nothing so much as a drug deal.
(Dad, at this late date, no longer remembers who or where. Obviously she was a retired lab pig, but all other data has vanished into the past.)
I named her Gwenyth, for reasons I won’t explain. Compared to the current standards of care for guinea pigs, we housed her atrociously - and solo - but honestly we didn’t know better. All I had to go on was an old British book on guinea-pig care, which mostly presumed they would be kept in outdoor hutches. There was no Internet.
However, she didn’t seem to mind. She was an excellent pig, and was fed very well at least - pellets and hay, vitamin C in her water, and heaps and heaps of vegetable and fruit scraps and dandelion leaves. When the weather was mild she was occasionally taken out to graze on the lawn, under an overturned box to prevent dashes into the azalea bushes; the box would edge gradually across the grass, revealing a neatly shorn patch. A rock could be placed on top to prevent movement, but then the inhabitant (we did this also with later pigs) would go back and trim the grass down to the ground.
She was never what I would call a cuddler, but didn’t protest being held, and enjoyed the occasional waddle around the living room. She and our second pig, Cinnamon, also knew precisely the sound of the fridge door opening, and would make their intolerable starvation known. Shrilly.
I think she lived about six years in our house, after an unknown period as a lab animal. She came down with something and stopped eating, and my mother mixed up a slurry of ground pellets, milk, and something else, and force-fed her with a dropper until she recovered. (There were no vets available that would treat a small animal, and even if there were, my parents would not have spent the money.) The second time Gwenyth got sick, it didn’t work; but she’d had a pretty long life by then.
Somewhere, I still have a photo of Gwenyth on a table on a spread-out newspaper, all blurred light and ruby eyes from the flash, with a little dish of revoltingly green slurry and a dropper, and my mother seated there...and our cat, seated in my mother’s lap, with her nose in the dish. Rose had a strange passion for mushed-up alfalfa pellets, which was hilarious.
There’s no point to this story. Gwenyth just came to mind, and I like to remember her, her pink and white livery, her placidity, her food shrieks (wwwwhhhhhEEEEET! wwwwhhhhhEEEEET! whheet whheet whheet WWHHHEEEEETTT!), the contented, industrious munch of a cavy with a pile of greenery to get through. The crisp sound of lettuce, the scrush of apple bits, the harder crunch of carrots, the way one could feed a dandelion through the cage bars and watch it steadily vanish like a ticker tape in reverse. That particular woody rodent smell. The absolute softness of her ears. Her tiny tender feet with their delicate little nails. The way her fur slicked over her rump to showcase the absolute lack of tail. The ridiculousness of a yawn and stretch.
A small life whose entire being was focused on “what delicious thing will land in my cage today?”
She was a good pig. I remember her.
no subject
Date: 2024-07-22 02:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-23 03:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-23 01:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-23 03:21 am (UTC)