Schott - The accidental veterinarian: tales from a pet practice

Like most children and almost every veterinarian, I was fascinated with animals from a very young age. And like most children, my fascination spawned a relentless campaign to obtain a pet. My parents were, however, not pet people. Far from it. My parents didnt have pets growing up (it was war-torn Germany after all there were many other priorities, like survival), and none of the people they knew once we immigrated to Saskatoon had pets. It simply wasnt part of their world. They didnt view pet ownership as a bad thing, necessarily, but it was something other people did, like line dancing or cross-dressing. A dog was so clearly out of the question that I never actually dared to ask, and I understood that the suggestion of a cat would be received no differently than a suggestion of a warthog or a rhesus monkey. So I set my sights lower and began the work of building up the Mongolian gerbil as the ideal pet in my parents minds.

This prolonged effort had no discernible effect whatsoever until Christmas of 1977, when a large, rectangular object covered by a decidedly non-festive grey tablecloth appeared under the tree. I had more or less given up on the gerbil campaign by that point. I was actually afraid that the large rectangular object would be a gigantic Meccano set as part of my fathers own campaign to get me interested in something practical. But no to my astonishment, the object revealed itself to be a cage. A large cage, hand-built by my father out of heavy gauge one-inch galvanized steel mesh. This cage was solid. It appeared to be designed to help its occupant withstand earthquakes, tornadoes, mortar attacks and significant civil unrest.

But there was no occupant.

Oh wow! Thank you, thank you! Its a... Its a... Its an empty cage.

My parents peered closely at the cage and then looked at each other. There had been a gerbil in there just half an hour ago. Now there was no gerbil. My father, the physicist, expressed astonishment and disbelief that a gerbil could pop through one-inch mesh. But pop through it evidently had, like a button through a buttonhole. The remaining gift openings and assorted Christmas rituals were abandoned, and the hunt was on. Two bewildered adults and two manic children scoured the house until eventually the gerbil was found, pooping silently in a corner under a cabinet.

Incidentally, as an aside for the uninitiated, a Mongolian gerbil is a small desert rodent (I first wrote dessert rodent, and it slipped by the spellchecker as well) with tan-coloured fur and a long tail ending in a fuzzy tuft, a bit like a lions tail. They bite a lot less than hamsters, and they stink a lot less than mice.

As soon as the gerbil was captured, my father set to work covering the cage with fly screen. This was effective for a day or two, but then the gerbil chewed through the fly screen. It was patched and patched again, but the gerbil was nothing if not relentless. What eventually put a stop to his repeated escapes were sunflower seeds. Or, more precisely, the morbid obesity caused by the continuous intake of high-fat sunflower seeds. He soon became unable to squeeze his bulk through that mesh anymore. So he stayed in the cage, exchanging his freedom for tasty snacks. A trade-off familiar to Doritos addicts everywhere.

Over time, the gerbil and I became close. Or, more accurately, I should say that I became close to him; for his part, I think its safe to say that the gerbil was largely indifferent to me or really anything other than his sunflower seeds. I originally named him Berbil, but this morphed into Berbo and then Bobo, which is ultimately the version that stuck.

Eventually Bobo died and was not replaced. The cage ended up in the basement with the suitcases and old coffee makers and was forgotten until one bitterly cold January morning when my father found a pocket gopher, an essentially blind burrowing animal that should have been hibernating but was out wandering in disoriented circles on a snowy field. My father dusted off the cage and then, to our collective astonishment, walked out onto the field to scoop up the surprised rodent. Failing to recognize the good deed, it bit him savagely, but my father persisted and brought him inside and placed him carefully in the cage. Ultimately, over the course of the next three or four months, he and the pocket gopher developed a peculiar and, it seems, mutually beneficial relationship. The gopher was released in the spring, and the cage never saw use again. In my minds eye I picture it in some deep substratum of the Saskatoon landfill, intact, unbroken, still sturdy like the day my father built it.