Author: Tracey
share

Reading Liz Dawes ‘21 kids and counting’ reminded me of my own gerbil experience.

I must confess I sometimes used bribery to encourage (force) my children into doing things.  How do you get your child into the best secondary school?  Just agree that if she works really hard she can have a hamster.  We are not pet people, never have been probably never will.  My success with small animals wasn’t great as a child, one rabbit died of sunstroke and another drowned.  I am far more suited to large animals or better still no animals at all.

The bribery worked, my daughter won her place at the chosen school and duly asked for her hamster.  Being the kind mother that I am (don’t believe everything you read) off we went to the pet shop to choose said hamster. 

Once in Aladdin’s cave both my children fell in love with small rodents.  Charlotte with a little ball of apricot fluff immediately called Whiskers, and Chris fell in love with two glossy black gerbils.  Now this wasn’t the deal, we had gone shopping for one animal not three, but when I asked about buying one gerbil, I was firmly told that they were brothers and they had to be kept together.  Any mother will know the pleading faces, the promises of, ‘I’ll clean them every day’, ‘and feed them’, ‘and play with them’.  So we left the shop with one hamster, two gerbils and enough plastic tubing, sawdust and food to fill the entire boot of the car. 

Our family now included Whiskers the hamster and Chris and Harry the gerbils, only my son could call a rodent after himself.  For the first week everyone was happy, I soon settled into the routine of cleaning and feeding the animals, no surprises there and the children enjoyed playing with them as promised, until the evening before Charlotte started at her new school.  The children were playing with their pets and I was sewing on name labels, as you do only minutes before your child goes off to school – or is that only me?

The peace was shattered when I heard “Mum, Mum, quickly Harry’s tail has come off”. 

Harry apparently made an escape and as Chris, the son, not the other rodent, tried to grab him he caught his tail and the fur slipped off the end.  Not a pleasant sight, this little creature with a small piece of bone protruding from his fur.  It was 7.00 pm and I didn’t have a vet, so a quick flick through Yellow Pages (this was pre internet days) and I found a 24 hour drop in vet only a few miles away.  I bundled two sobbing children and one bewildered gerbil into the car and drove to the vet.  On examination the vet explained that gerbils have jointed tails that can break off if they ever get caught in the wild, in Harry’s case the fur had come off and the bone remained intact.

The vet in a serious voice explained that Harry would need an anaesthetic and he would amputate the bone and stitch the skin, Harry would be as good as new albeit with a shorter tail.  As the children sobbed I was calculating how much an emergency operation was going to cost.  Nervously I asked the vet, he replied £120!  He must have seen my ashen face and asked if I would like to call anyone?  Yes, the bank manager sprang to mind.  How on earth could it cost so much to cut and shut a tiny tail?  To my shame I asked what the alternative was.  The vet looked at me as if I was the mother from hell and said Madam, there is no alternative.  I called my husband who said that Harry was part of the family now and we had to pay whatever it cost to put him right.  Thankfully the vet didn’t hear this!  Harry went into theatre and we went home.

The following day Harry had a shorter tail and I had a lighter wallet!