seymour

you know what a prairie dog looks like, right?

completely adorable and so fuzzy!

when i was 20, i was a live-in nanny for a family with three little kids. i'd been there for over a year when i went into a pet store one day and they were selling prairie dogs. oh my gosh, i couldn't stand the cuteness of these little guys! i was overwhelmed with my need to own one no matter what.

it was $100 for the critter and $200 for the cage which, fifteen years ago was really pricey. but it didn't matter if it was a thousand dollars. i was going to find a way to own one.

i went home and begged my boss to let me bring one to her house where i lived. she reluctantly agreed as long as it would stay in the cage and not make her house stink.

away i went, back to the pet store to pick out a prairie dog of my very own. i ooo'ed and aawww'ed over them all for a while and then picked out the sweetest little boy ever. i took him home and got his giant three story cage all set up for him. 

i loved him. i poured over maps to find a perfect name for him. i wanted to give him a name that would represent his roots, so i picked the name seymour after a town in texas where i imagined he might have been born.

seymour never liked to be held very much. he was definitely a wild animal even though he lived in a cage in my room. he was silent all the time, but seemed happy when i fed him every day. i kept waiting to hear the legendary prairie dog bark, but months went by without so much as a peep.

then one day i got sick. i had a nasty cold and couldn't stop coughing. and suddenly, seymour wasn't mute anymore. he barked every time i coughed. day and night. yip, yip, yip. i'm still not sure if he was making alarm calls or if he was responding as if my cough was conversational. once i was healthy again, i would often fake cough just to get him to bark at me.

the kids i lived with thought seymour was pretty cool. they spent a lot of time in my room talking to him, watching him, petting his little face and paws with their fingers through the bars of his cage.

unfortunately, he started getting aggressive after a few months. he would bite any finger he could grab and he chewed at the bars incessantly. sometimes i would come into my room and find a toenail on the floor and blood spatters on my rug from him trying to dig his way to freedom. he also started to smell really bad. my room became super ratty and gross.

i contacted the pet store to see if i could sell him back, but they weren't having it. i tried several places in the area like animal shelters, zoos, wildlife conservations places, but no one would even take him for free. one place did tell me though that it was prairie dog mating season and his behavior was typical of a male looking for a female. so there i was, stuck with this angry, stinking critter who was hurting himself in his desperation to get out of his cage. it made my heart sad every time i walked into my room or thought about poor seymour.

there came a time when i finally had to admit defeat. i couldn't keep a bitey, stanky, self destructive rodent in my nanny house any longer. and no one would take him. i couldn't think of anything else to do, so i drove way out of town in my little hatchback car with seymour in his cage in the back end. i found a place that was mainly devoid of humans and i set him free. he scampered off lickety split into the underbrush without so much as a look back.

i bawled my eyes out and then took his big, expensive cage and pitched it into a dumpster behind some shopping center because i never wanted to see it again. i didn't want to be reminded of my failure to make a lovable pet out of an adorable wild animal. i didn't want to think about the fate that probably awaited my little seymour now that he was back in the wild again.

when i think back on it now, i like to imagine that maybe he found a foxy little squirrel girl to shack up with and maybe they made some nifty mixed race babies. maybe he lived to be an old grandpa, telling stories to the kids about his former life spent barking at the coughing lady in the big house.