Thursday, February 9, 2012

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.

29 comments:

  1. That is one of the cutest animals I've ever seen, it's so otter like! I'm sorry to hear letting him go hurt so much, but it was for the best I guess!

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  2. Where was I the day you set him free??? I'm surprised you didn't ask me to go with you. Actually, was I even around when you had him? You know me and my memory ;)

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    1. yeah, why weren't you there with me? you let me down, bff!

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  3. They are cute - but really remind me of tailless squirrels. I bet most of us have gotten a pet - whether a gerbil or parrot or something weirder - that we have not been able to handle.

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    1. they are related to squirrels. so were you the parrot lady who couldn't make it work?

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  4. Thank goodness Seymour wasn't a gorilla.

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    1. you make me laugh, al. i'm glad he wasn't a gorilla too! might have been weird if he'd barked at me when i coughed.

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    2. And gorilla mating season would have been way scary.

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    3. indeed it would have been. something i wouldn't want to witness up close.

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  5. I must say..I have never ever ever heard of anyone wanting a prairie dog for a Pet.
    You are a loving soul my dear.
    Out in my neck of the woods...we, um....sorry
    exterminate those critters. Hard on crops and stuff.

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    1. i guess i wouldn't love them if they were eating my livelihood either, but i've never lived in a place where they roam freely. only seen them at zoos.

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  6. I think Seymour was silent because he had no mother prairie dog to teach him how to speak. When he heard you cough he finally knew what he was supposed to do with his own voice and began using it just like you taught him! I wonder what his barking would have sounded like if you had had sneezing fits instead of a cough.

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    1. when i was writing this post, i did a little research about prairie dogs and apparently they're sucked out of their burrows with vacuum machines! no telling how old he was when he got sucked up.

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  7. For some reason this struck me as hilarious. I don't know why, since really a prairie dog is just a giant guinea pig (or maybe not, it looks like one anyway), and lots of people have guinea pigs as pets.

    I'm sure he had a very happy life once he was free to mate!

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    1. As far as that last line, that pretty much goes for everyone! ;-)

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  8. you've raised an interesting point Sherilin: that we humans think we have the right to make ANY creature into a pet, and how it just doesn't work out. I'm sure Seymour was very happy when he was released. Here's another thing though: if he had to be sold to anyone, isn't it a good thing he was sold to YOU? I think so.

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    1. i don't know how great his life was once he was free. they don't live in my part of the country, so he wouldn't have found any of his own kind here, but maybe he was just happy to dig a hole in dirt and be happy he was out of that metal cage.
      when i read a couple days ago that to catch prairie dogs to sell, they're vacuumed out of their burrows and then sold, i felt kind of bad about it. and they're meant to live in community, not in isolation. live and learn. i won't make that mistake again.

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  9. Good gosh - what type of vacuum cleaner do they use...?

    Maybe they could increase the size a bit and let the fire department start using them.

    HOLD ON IN THERE WE ARE SENDING IN 'THE TUBE';
    YOU WILL BE OUT....SWOOOSH
    Hey there little buddy. That was close. Are you OK?

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  10. Awww! You did right by Seymore, you did. Sniff, sniff.

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    1. i don't know if it was right or wrong, but it seemed like my only option at the time.

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  11. No! This is a sad story! Boo.

    Also, isn't that what people always do with their pithons - let them lose in the wild and then those guys on tv have to go find them all? Maybe seymour is a tv star!

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  12. yup, I don't think you can domesticate any pet. I don't even think you can domesticate some domesticated pets! You did the right thing. But poor you!

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    1. brooke has a very undomesticated cat. we've had her since birth, but she's still a wild girl

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    2. You sent an animal back into the wild after keeping him as a pet. TO make it even worse you set him free in an area where there are no other prairie dogs and you are on here applauding yourself? You did a horrible thing, there are plenty of rescues who would have taken him. If he turned into what you say it's because you did not pay attention to him and just left him in his cage alone all day.

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    3. i don't applaud myself one bit. i hated the choice i made, but i tried with every animal shelter, petting zoo, pet store and museum within several hours drive of my house. no one would take him. and i paid lots of attention to him. unfortunately, he was a wild animal and didn't care for the attention of humans. the pet store should be blamed for selling them to the ignorant humans. i was 20. lesson learned. don't buy exotic pets that you know nothing about.

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  13. The reason he was so anti-social is because prairie dogs are herding animals or they live in groups. I'm ten and may be getting a prairie dog, if I do get one I would have a min. of two. Also at what age did you get your prairie dog, the younger the prairie is the more major bonding time you'll have. Six to eight weeks old is the perfect time to buy one, then you'll have time for some bottle feeding and major bonding time.

    P.S.
    If you ever get another P.D. and it acts that way get anouther P.D. so it will have a herd. And please never ever never ever ever release an exotic pet into the wild again even if you can find that animal in your own yard never let them go..... you can start major out-breaks.....there are always other options, never ever go with that one though.....

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    1. clearly you know more about prairie dogs and their needs at the age of ten than i did at the age of 20. i did no research until it was too late. i would never release a pet into the wild now, but at the time i didn't know better. also, the reason he was acting that way is because he was going through a hormonal phase where it was time for him to find a lady p.d. and start a family of his own, so he was very frustrated to be stuck in a cage in my house. i don't blame him for being mad. i didn't know then.
      kudos to you for learning a lot about something that you love and the best way to handle it. you're going about things the right way. much better than i did.

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don't let me be the only one doing the talking around here. spill your guts!