Anybody else remember The Croods?
ByGD
Pet Penguin
It had nothing to do with the plot, but I was fascinated by the warm weather breed pet penguin in Neon Genesis Evangelion. Not that I actually wanted one for myself. Domestication of wild animals for pets is ethically questionable at best, plus birds are messy. But many years after watching Evangelion, I found myself in possession of a penguin for a short time.
I was at a music festival in Iceland. Intending to take a nap before dinner so we’d have energy to stay up for the late bands, we headed back to the tent. But like the three bears, we found a Goldilocks in a penguin suit sound asleep headfirst in my husband’s bag.
We couldn’t just leave him there for fear of him vomiting in our tent. But we couldn’t wake him. So we called on our neighbors for help. With a person on each ankle and one to hold the bag, we extricated the squatter from our tent and roused him to semicoherence.
Giant Penguin
The tall Icelandic youth wearing a penguin suit had drunk too much and gone to sleep it off, but was unable to locate his friends’ tent. Despite teasing about maternal instincts from the neighbors, I felt nervous just sending him on his way. So I walked him back to the festival lost and found.
We chatted along the way. I was impressed that he spoke English so well when he could barely remain upright and was obviously trying to deal with pants that had fallen down inside his suit. But he said, “Yeah, but I couldn’t do higher maths now.”
I told the ladies at the lost and found that I wanted to turn in a lost child. They were a bit bemused, that never having happened before at an 18+ festival, and the penguin took mild offense. He was, after all, more than a foot taller than me.
“Child?” he protested.
“Well, you are wandering around lost in fuzzy pajamas.”
I left him sitting on a chair nearby once the festival volunteers agreed to keep an eye on him until his friends showed up or he remembered where he was camping.
It turned out that he was only off by a couple of tents, so we ran into each other several times that weekend and got to be friends a bit for the duration of the festival. But I won’t share his name or any of the interesting details of his life. After all, he’s probably all grown up by now.
ByGD
Where’s Hammie
Dwarf hamsters might be even worse pets than rabbits. Where rabbits cower, dwarf hamsters burrow and hide. And they are pretty well camouflaged in their bedding. They actually make brightly colored bedding for hamsters, probably to make it easier to find your pet in its cages. But I was worried about the potential health effects on such a short-lived animal of eating dyed paper. So the closest we ever got to playing with our pet hamster was a Waldo-like “Where’s Hammie?” game.
ByGD
Stand Off
When we first got our rabbit, we were very worried about the cat. Although he was the smallest cat in the neighborhood, he dominated our end of the block – no other cats dared enter our yard. And he routinely dragged prey larger than himself through our cat door to finish them off in the comfort of home.
We introduced the cat to the rabbit through the safety of bars, but we didn’t need to worry. Maybe it was because the cat was getting on in years. But we had this initial standoff in which he deeply considered the options. Then he seemed to decide:
The new thing is not a cat.
The new thing is not a threat.
The new thing is not prey.
The new thing does not exist.
And from then on, he refused to acknowledge the existence of the rabbit, even when the rabbit tried to approach him.
ByGD
Lionhead Messi
When my daughter got our first pet lionhead rabbit, she was on a soccer team. She named the messy little animal after the famous soccer player, Lionel Messi. Back when we still thought rabbits could be fun, we tried to find ways to play with Lionhead Messi. The moment captured in the photo is the only time that Messi approached a soccer ball – or any other offered toy. It’s as close as he ever came to living up to the name Messi – or, for that matter, the name pet.