We recently visited a friend whose home was full of animals. No exaggeration. Five tortoises, six cats, dogs, rabbits, fish, frogspawn... The boys were like, "Whoah!" and we all wanted to steal the baby tortoise, which was super cute even if it did do a giant poo on Son 2.
We have quite the menagerie at our house too. A large and fluctuating number of chickens, including one oversized and noisy cockerel, gerbils, fish, and a giant African land snail.
The giant snail was rescued from a friend who couldn't have him anymore because of the conditions that went with her housing. (Personally, I don't understand what damage one snail could possibly do to a property but, hey, I'm not a letting agent.) We thought Speedy was quite cool and interesting for about five minutes, then we realised that snails hardly do anything ever, and we basically have a tank of compost gathering flies in our house. He (she?) hibernates for half the year which is even less interesting than summer months when he occasionally travels sideways/upside down around the perimeters of the tank, revealing his enormous foot. We've since tried to donate him to several primary school teacher friends to be a class pet, but amazingly noone else seems to want him either.
The first time we had some Ukrainians round for dinner, they were quite interested in Speedy, and asked if he was for my face.
"My face?" I repeated, thinking something must be lost in translation.
Apparently this is a thing in Eastern Europe; the daughters happily told me about how gross it was when sometimes at home in Ukraine their mum used to lie down and put snails on her face. They wouldn't take Speedy either though.
The gerbils are definitely more active and entertaining, skittering about everywhere and chewing on things and playfighting. The boys love to make them do mazes too, thanks to a YouTube craze, and the gerbils don't seem to mind, as long as there's seeds involved at the end. Before the gerbils, we had a temporary and very skittish guinea pig in lockdown, and then three mice, thanks to a son's obsession with 'The Witches', until one by one the mice succumbed to huge cancerous tumours, which was a bit traumatic in that I was too cheap to have them euthanised at the vets, and too squeamish to do the job myself. Anyway, the issue with all the rodents we've had recently is that when they escape they are fiendishly hard to catch. We used to regularly have humane mice traps down in the house because the boys went through a phase of getting the mice out to play in the morning and then neglecting to shut them back in their cage before we all went to school. Our church small group were very tolerant of my repeated prayer requests about lost rodents. On things lost and found. (sarahhadfi.wixsite.com) I just don't think rodents appreciate our company as much as we enjoy theirs. Although back when I was a child, I had guinea pigs which I do believe loved me because when I went in the garden then would run and stand on my foot and squeak to be picked up, and they seemed pretty happy to sit on my lap and be groomed with a toothbrush.
The chickens are fun, not cuddly, but entertaining - half garden ornaments, and half food source (just eggs - we did used to eat our male chickens but Son 2 was so traumatised by this he became a vegetarian, which is both admirable and a bit of a hassle, especially in a house of other dietary requirements). Hatching chicks really is super cute and fun, so long as you have a plan with what to do with the males; Son 2 has twice asked for egg-hatching for his birthday, and then there was the difficulty of finding acceptable end points for unwanted cockerels. Once we put quail eggs in the incubator and the chicks were incredibly tiny and sweet, and also good entertainment during lockdown and apparently the only thing that got my Year 11s talking on live lessons ("Show us the quail chicks again, Miss?") There has been chicken-related upset though. When we first moved out to a village and were so excited to live by a brook and overlooking fields, we didn't quite consider the rat factor. Giant rats. Incredibly nimble, tunnelling rats, that can get into an enclosure that we thought was safe because it wasn't ever breached by an urban fox. We lost an entire covey of quail to rats; they kindly ate their heads and legs and left the rest behind, sort of stacked up. Happily, the rat attacks are now resolved, thanks to the advice of a pest control man who came to fumigate our house at the Great Bird Mite disaster, and told us to put wire mesh UNDER the chicken enclosure so the rats would give up. They immediately did. But there was a period where my husband turned into one of the mad farmers in "Fantastic Mr Fox", sitting in the dark with a night scope, determined to kill the vermin and protect the hens.
The fish were not my choice and I am not totally convinced, given that we had past disasters with fish, following some poor advice and poor water quality, so we had ten neon tetra who died one per day for ten days, like some sadistic parody of a children's counting song. But they do at least act as exposure therapy for the son who has a fish phobia (not sure where that came from?!) and we recently even managed a successful visit to Sea Life Centre, so it's probably worth it.
Before all this we had a cat who was a thoroughly fickle creature. She ran up vet bills with her STDs and then fully defected to the neighbours when we had our second child. We'd run out of laps for her to sit on, and the neighbours insisted on enticing her over with permanently open windows and ever-flowing bowls of food they left by their front door for all the neighbourhood cats to feast on. I think we'd all love a cat again, but they don't go well with the caravanning lifestyle - much less easy to take to a neighbour's, like you can do with a rodent cage.
Cheating now, but we have a Sunday dog (well, our neighbour has a dog and we walk it every Sunday.) This was considered fun and neighbourly by everyone else for about two weeks, and now it is just me cajoling (dragging) the boys along. I reckon it's one of those things, where the idea of it isn't that appealing, but we're normally all glad when we have done it, and we have good chats as we go. Once we took the dog blackberry picking, and discovered it would do anything for a blackberry, and it spontaneously started raising its front paws, rolling over, etc. and looking at us, which was funny and like something from a cartoon. The dog is a trained assistance dog so can do a bunch of tricks like fetching your phone if it rings, but it's not actually all that amazing to walk, and it poos, like, a LOT. Once 15 poos in one walk. It's like it saves it all up for us as a weekend treat.
Really stretching things now, but one year my sister-in-law adopted a donkey for us, which was fun and novel, and then we all went to visit the donkey together, and the boys were outraged to discover we weren't the only adopters. There were video conferencing opportunities (mostly just with an empty field as the donkeys mustn't've been cooperating, once with carols, which was kind of odd), and once the donkey sent us a Valentines card, which all seemed a little bit "A Midsummer Night's Dream."
Anyway, that is our happy home of animals, and the boys are still campaigning for a tortoise, and Sons 2 and 3 both currently have career ambitions involving animals, so we shall see.
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