The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter (35 page)

sixth annual American Gerbil Society gerbil show in Bedford, Massachusetts. The show is being held at the Bedford Plaza, a modest three-story brick hotel with a swimming pool, a restaurant, and free pitchers of iced tea and lemonade in the lobby. There is no outward sign that the hotel has been overrun by gerbil enthusiasts from as far away as Missouri and Oregon, Canada and Argentina, other than the nervous desk clerks who eye people’s pockets as if expecting rodents to pop right out of them.

I’ve brought my son, Aidan, and two of his friends with me. The boys charge up the three flights of stairs to the conference room, which is packed with more than a hundred people. A spillover crowd mills around outside the doors. Rows of tables line the room, with more tables in the center. The tables are piled with cages brought in by breeders who are showing off not only gerbils but other exotic pocket pets as well: dwarf hamsters and South African pygmy hedgehogs, ferrets and degus, chinchillas, and pygmy mice no bigger than my fingernail.

As I mingle with members of the American Gerbil Society, I recall one of my mother’s favorite sayings: “There’s a lid for every pot.” The breeders are all earnest and friendly. They are the sorts of people who wear their many passions emblazoned on their T-shirts: American Gerbil Society, Greyhound Festival, Christmas Revels, Audubon Society. If they weren’t here, these people would be out walking for good causes.

“Pygmy mice babies are so small that you have to be careful not to dump the little ones out when you change the shavings,” one breeder tells Aidan as my son watches her mini-mice nibble and hop.

“I probably shouldn’t admit this here, but I’ve always liked hamsters better than gerbils,” confides the solitary hamster breeder at the show, a redhead with a pierced tongue and a herd of plush black teddy bear hamsters. “It’s a strictly aesthetic thing. I don’t like rodents with tails.”

One of the gerbil breeders proudly shows me her foundation sire, a marvelously muscular black-and-white pied gerbil alone in a cage. “I had him paired with a lovely Siamese girl, but I’m retiring him now,” she explains when I ask where the gerbil’s mate is. “He’s going to live out the rest of his days with one of his grandsons.”

A few side tables in the conference room display gerbil paraphernalia for sale: gerbil bags and gerbil hats, gerbil blankets and crazy-looking wooden gerbil houses, books about gerbils and statues of gerbils, too. One item for sale is a book about a gerbil who sculpts; the author, Judith Block, is a New York artist who has kept a tank of gerbils in her kitchen since 1972. She is petite with springy red curls and oversized glasses,
and clearly in her element as she helps judge one of the pet classes. She once bought gerbils from my father, Judith tells me when I introduce myself.

“Gerbils are all about love,” she says, handing a small plastic cage back to a pint-sized boy with freckles. “Gerbils are so intelligent and fun, and each one has a different personality.” She gazes down at the boy, her eyes magnified, hypnotizing, and asks him what his gerbil does best.

“Nibbles!” the boy says. “That’s his name, too.”

The pet class begins as Judith and I talk. A teenage boy with an elaborate sound system and a smooth disc-jockey voice proclaims, “Lilac and Blossom can run on their wheel in tandem!” as their young owner holds up their carry cage for everyone to see. For the first time in decades, I remember Kinky, my unappreciated gerbil, born decades ahead of her time, and imagine myself here as a child, showing off her tricks. Where is that wrinkle in time when you need it most?

Meanwhile, Judith tells me that her favorite pet of all time was Phoebe, a gerbil artist whose work was so phenomenal that Judith created not only the book on display here but also a website to showcase it:
www.phoebe.agsgerbils.org
. In the preface of her webpages, Judith calls the sculptures crafted by Phoebe the gerbil “reminiscent of certain species of cactus, or of archeological finds in the Bayanzag Valley of the Gobi Desert, where some of the world’s oldest dinosaur fossils have been discovered. Since Phoebe, born in NYC, has never left the Riverdale section of the Bronx, her works perhaps harken back to DNA memory, or possibly to some interspecies, Jungian collective unconscious.”

Phoebe’s sculptures appear on the website with titles such as
Twilight on the Gobi, Antler Totem
, or
Desert Cloud
. Judith has written a haiku for each of them, and the haiku appears in Spanish as well as English, thanks to an Argentine gerbil lover, Laura Pimás, whom Judith met through the American Gerbil Society. For instance, the haiku for
Twilight on the Gobi
reads:

“Phoebe was unique,” Judith concludes fondly. “All gerbils chew cardboard tubes and destroy them, but Phoebe was an artist in a gerbil’s body. She’d chew on a colored cardboard tube, then step away and look at what she’d done, and then go back and chew, just like an artist who never thinks her art is finished. If her sculptures were done by people and brought to a design class, we’d say they’re works of art.”

In the next room, judges in white coats prod and examine and play with various gerbils competing in their show classes, evaluating them for body build, color, and personality in much the same way judges examine dogs at the Westminster Dog Show. Males are supposed to be buff, females more streamlined, and all prize-winning gerbils have fur tails with admirable tufts. A gerbil’s biggest dream, or at least his owner’s, is to win Best in Show.

The gerbils at the American Gerbil Society show look nothing like my dad’s. Ours were plain brown, with black tufts on their tails and creamy bellies. Here, there are orange gerbils with white bellies and ruby eyes. There are deep gray gerbils, light gray purplish gerbils, and nutmeg gerbils—that’s a calico color. There are even Siamese gerbils that look just like Siamese cats, except that they’re gerbils.

I stand around and watch the judging for a bit. “Every gerbil at an AGS show is handled by a judge,” says American Gerbil Society president Donna Anastasi, one of the show judges and author of the top-selling gerbil book for pet lovers,
Gerbils: The Complete Guide to Gerbil Care
(Bowtie, 2005). “If they nip, they lose points on personality. At hamster shows, the judges don’t even handle the animals,” she adds with a sniff. “They have to pick the hamsters up with a scoop.”

Donna is a young, fit-looking mother of two, a soccer mom married to a college professor. She graduated from Smith College and now works as a human-factors engineer. “Go ahead and call me nerdy,” she laughs. “I definitely am.”

As we chat, there is an instant connection. Like me, Donna is the daughter of a military man; children who grow up with Air Force, Army, or Navy parents have a special radar for one another, perhaps because we’re always friendly but hold a part of ourselves in reserve. We know from experience that you can lose everything you hold dear in an instant.

Donna’s father was a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force, and she attended eight different schools before he retired. “I was shy to begin with, so moving was really hard for me,” she confesses.

She attributes her passion for animals to that Air Force upbringing. “It took years of begging to get one parakeet because we moved around so much.” In 1999, she bought her first gerbils at a pet store on a whim, “for the kids.”

Today, Donna is a gerbil guru. Her website, ABC Gerbils, earns hundreds of hits daily. Through the years she has bred for gentle temperament and special colors, and to eliminate seizures and other common, naturally occurring health problems in gerbils. Her latest mission is to acquire a blue gerbil; she’s excited because a gerbil-loving buddy of hers who is traveling to Iraq has promised to bring her one.

“We don’t have any blue gerbils in the States yet,” she says. “They have them in Europe, but they aren’t willing to give them up.” She laughs. “European gerbil societies, like the National Gerbil Society in Britain, think that Americans jump into things too quickly. Like, we’ve already made ‘mottled’ an official color category, but that’s still provisional for them. The British gerbil breeders seem to think that we Americans are loose cannons.”

T
HE
world of gerbil fanciers is underground unless you look for it, a mostly online community that gathers twice a year for shows. The American Gerbil Society didn’t exist when Dad started his farm, but many of its members have heard of him. My father ended up selling his inbred line of Tumblebrook Farm gerbils to Charles River Laboratories, which continues to provide them to scientists around the world for research studies. Charles River is the Microsoft of laboratory animal
companies; these days it’s headed up by Jim Foster, Henry’s son, named “Entrepreneur of the Year” by
Forbes
magazine in 2002, the same year that Charles River was named “Company of the Year” by the
Boston Globe
.

Jim led the company’s foray into providing preclinical testing services for pharmaceutical companies, recognizing that with new techniques using computer models and cell cultures, the need for disease research on live animals is rapidly diminishing. In the past five years, Charles River’s laboratory animal business has declined from 80 percent of its profits to just 40 percent.

Terrence Fisher, the man who sealed the original deal with Dad, agreed to meet with me last year when I called and expressed curiosity about where our gerbils had ended up. I drove to the main headquarters of Charles River in Wilmington, Massachusetts. Fisher, the general manager of business development and surgical services for North American research models, is a small man but moves like a professional athlete. He bounces on the balls of his feet with his shoulders thrown back; when it emerged later that he was in the military until joining Charles River in 1979, I wasn’t surprised.

My father’s gerbils—or rather, a germ-free line of their descendants—are housed not in Wilmington but in a separate facility in Kingston, New York, because of government regulations. But Fisher gave me a tour of one of the animal buildings, and I breathed in the familiar pungent smells of rodents, wood shavings, and food pellets. The food and water bottles looked just like ours. So did the racks of clear cages with wire tops.

On closer inspection, though, Charles River is a completely
different kind of laboratory animal facility. Tumblebrook Farm was mostly a family business, a farm of sorts. We often had gerbils running loose; curious escapees would come and sit on my foot while I was cleaning cages, and I’d scoop them up and toss them back into a cage. Our workers were spotty sweepers, too, so there was always a scattering of shavings and pellets on the floor.

The Charles River floors are freshly painted and surgically clean, even with more than 187,000 mice and rats living in the one building I saw. The food at Charles River is irradiated and then placed into vacuum-sealed bags to keep it free of contaminants. The air the animals breathe is filtered. So is the water they drink. The rodents are housed in isolation tanks—separate rooms within the larger building that are created by plastic walls, with perhaps two dozen cages in each. The workers wear surgical scrubs and never come into skin-to-skin contact with their rodent charges.

To do anything with the animals, the caretakers have to insert their arms into giant plastic sleeves built into isolation tank walls and attached to unnervingly bright green gloves. As an added precaution against disease, Charles River inserts “nude sentinels” into the colonies. These are rodents with no immune systems who act like canaries in a coal mine.

Because the isolator tanks at Charles River are pressurized, occasionally the plastic sleeves and gloves pop out of them when they’re not in use and they start waving about in the aisles like ghosts. The workers must be used to this strange sight, but I walked carefully down the center of every aisle behind Terrence Fisher, not wanting to feel those cold green plastic fingers on my face or shoulder. There was something too
cold and sterile about it all; I couldn’t even imagine holding one of these mice. Maybe, for the workers, that made their jobs easier, I thought: not being able to feel the warmth of the animals in their hands.