Taking Sammy “back to the pet store”

Lydia is an absent-minded little girl. A while back I compared her to Tom Bombadil, the only creature in all Middle Earth who is not tempted by the Ring of Power, and the only one, according to Tolkien, absent-minded enough to lose it if entrusted with it. When Lydia puts something down, it’s as good as gone. In the summer she loses a pair of shoes a day. She’s been known to step over her shoes with her bare feet on the way out a neighbor’s door. We would have to spend half my salary on Lydie’s shoes if we didn’t have kind neighbors knocking on our door, a dirty pair of purple Crocs dangling from their fingers.

Every night when we tuck her into her sleeping bag—yes, she insists on sleeping in a sleeping bag above her bed covers—she asks, “Where’s Penguin?” And we answer, “How should I know where Penguin is?” She doesn’t understand the logic of this question, so we end up turning the house upside down every night, looking for Dan, the stuffed penguin, Lydia’s bedfellow. We find Dan on the toilet, outside at the bottom of a plastic slide, stuffed in a suitcase.

Her grandmother once sent her a little plastic prism. Lydia took it up with joy and held it up to the sunlight coming down from the skylight and split the sun into a thousand colorful sparkles. Then, twenty seconds later, she put it down somewhere. Gone.

Apparently she has other things on her mind.

You may reasonably ask why, considering her absent-mindedness, we thought it would be a good idea to give her a guinea pig—a sentient being that requires, at the very least, regularly-dispensed food and water. And you may reasonably and more productively ask this question of Lydia’s mother Amy and not me—it was all her idea. Perhaps she was inspired by the tale of Horse Boy, the three year-old autistic whose language skills improved once he started riding Mongolian horses. Autism specialists call this approach hippotherapy, which goes to show you that even people with advanced degrees can get their animals all mixed up.

Actually, it may not be a bad idea to have Lydia sit on Sammy, her guinea pig, because it would be an inexpensive, though likely traumatic, way to get rid of him. Amy thought getting Lydie a guinea pig would teach her some responsibility, and, to our astonishment, it has. When the water gets low, she’ll fill it. When the food runs out and Sammy makes that violin-from-a-horror-movie noise, she’ll get him a leaf of romaine lettuce. From time to time she’ll go to Sammy’s cage on the floor of the pantry and squeak to him and stick a naked toe through the bars and offer Sammy a taste of her toenail. She’s been pretty good to Sammy, and Sammy’s been pretty good at squealing as loud as bus brakes and pooping all over his cage.

But alas, Sammy’s got to go. Apparently pregnant women shouldn’t be around cats and other furry animals because their feces could be contaminated with toxoplasma. Nobody cares if the rest of us breathe microscopic fecal matter contaminated with potentially lethal oocysts, but when pregnant women are involved, let’s all hyperventilate—but not around a full litter box. Anyway, I’m pretty sure you get toxoplasmosis from cats rather than guinea pigs, so I suspect Amy’s using her fetus as an excuse, which she does on occasion when taking seconds of dessert or when asked to participate in the Act of Marriage.

We’ve asked around the neighborhood, and nobody wants him. My neighbor down the street said he wasn’t interested but asked if we wanted a rabbit that their daughter had lost interest in caring for. We know we can take him to the animal shelter to have him “put down,” a practice far more sinister than merely assaulting his dignity. (Hey, I was put down every day in 7th grade.) The shelter, however, would charge us fifty bucks for “handling” (translation: injecting with lethal poison) and “disposal” (translation: burning the limp furry body in an incinerator).

But paying someone to kill our pet sounds to me like passing the buck. Shouldn’t I be man enough to take the poor, unwanted rodent out back and do him in myself, like my ancestors did with their horses and old dogs? Or has modern suburban life, scrubbed of any sign of nature’s red tooth and claw, made us into a squeamish lot, too delicate to deal death ourselves, except when participating in recreational activities like elk hunting and drive-bys? We’ll eat the corn-fed protein of the food industry’s mass slaughter–never mind the debeaking, the crowded pens, the cattle prods, the throat-slitting—but we wince at the thought of doing it ourselves.

When I began contemplating my life as a guinea pig slaughterer, I called my dad, who one afternoon had taken one of my sister’s hamsters “back to the pet store.” How did he do it, I asked? He said he gripped ol’ Felix, the hapless hamster with only three feet, and took him out to the back yard and zipped him up in a freezer bag and set him on the ground and brought a carpenter’s hammer down on his head. Dad said one of his neighbors devised a less bloody method for putting a pet to death. He put the family’s long-in-the-tooth, cancer-stricken toy poodle in a box, cut a hole in the box, ran a hose from the exhaust pipe of his truck to the hole in the box, and gassed the little guy.

Ew.

Amy has forbidden me to talk about this with anyone. The first few times I floated the idea in public garnered twisted looks of  horror, and dry heaving. People are odd that way: have a pet “put down” and people awwww sympathetically; say you’re going to put your pet in a Ziploc bag and crush his skull with an Ames True Temper sledge hammer, and suddenly you’re the bad guy. We have a bizarre collective moral compass.

Seriously, I’m just talking tough. I could never bring myself to do it. Those deep brown trembling eyes would look at me through the plastic of the freezer bag as I raised the hammer. I can step on an earwig without losing sleep, but really, a guinea pig is too much bone and blood and viscera. And he has a name. Can you brain an animal you’ve named?

It looks like Sammy and I are both safe. Last night we put a picture of him on an online classifieds site with the word “FREE” in all-caps, and the phone has been ringing off the hook. We haven’t asked these people what they want him for; perhaps someone’s pet python is hungry. At any rate, Lydia has made her peace with losing Sammy. A couple of nights ago she brought him his last piece of romaine lettuce and said her goodbyes. He’s going away, but he’s not going back to the pet store.

Advertisement