Myria has an interesting theory.  She feels that no matter how much objective time (if there even is such a thing) a life occupies from birth to death, all lifetimes are equal.  It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about mayflies (about a day) or Galapagos tortoises (200-300 years).

We acquired Snap in October of 2005.  She came home to our apartment with another pair of gerbils (Crackle and Pop), just a tiny, white little thing.  Well, they were all tiny and, for a time, all lived together in the same tank.  We were under the impression that they were all sisters from the same litter.  This turned out not to be the case :)

We’d had them about 6 weeks when a late night biting incident showed us that the little silver gerbil probably wasn’t related to the two taupe satins and that she would probably be better off on her own.  So we moved Snap into her own tank, made sure she had plenty of food, hay and fresh water, and provided her with roughly that same amount of cardboard chew toys that the other two (who actually were sisters) got.





You see, Snap was maniacal :) While it might take Crackle and Pop all evening, working in concert, to chew up a pasta box, Snap, working by herself, could shred the thing in about 20 minutes.  She was amazingly industrious, rearranging her living quarters on a daily basis sometimes and always jumping, digging or chewing.  She never seemed to sleep.  Myria and I evolved the theory that she was trying to take over the world (possibly some collective rodent unconscious tendency - either that, or she’d just seen too much Pinky and the Brain) and loved watching to see what Snap would come up with next.





Over the last couple of years, we have watched Snap tirelessly building fairly complicated tunnel systems in her tank, especially when the weather was cold.  Tunnels that led from bed to water bottle and small mountains of bedding and cardboard with holes in the top.  They looked like little volcanoes except instead of smoke, ash and lava, it erupted a gerbil!  The funny thing was, she would put all this time and effort into building something fairly intricate and then just tear it down to re-design it or move it to another corner of the tank.  She was tireless, our gerbil architect, and always seemed to have a new idea to explore and test.

She was, without a shadow of a doubt, one of the most driven and energetic gerbils I’ve ever had the opportunity to observe.

But she wasn’t all work.  She had a deep and abiding fondness for slivered almonds and unsalted pumpkin seeds.  One of those in her food bowl would send her into paroxysms of joy and she would whisk the coveted tidbit into a corner where she would turn and face out into the tank.  Then, backside protected, she would grasp the morsel with both forepaws and proceed to nibble it into extinction, tail twitching ever so slightly and eyes-half closed in sheer bliss.

Gerbils in general (most rodents, for that matter) and Snap in particular, have very fast metabolisms.  This sort of arrangement usually means a very, very active, though fairly short, life. There’s an old joke: 

What should you give a gerbil for Christmas? 

A third birthday…

A couple of weeks ago, we began noticing that Snap seemed to be slowing down.  She wasn’t chewing up her toys nearly as quickly and she had been.  In fact she was only partially breaking them down and then abandoning them, leaving oddly sculpted cardboard structures sitting in the middle of the tank.  She wasn’t paying attention to her toilette any more either; her coat was getting dirty and scruffy and she didn’t seem to care.  She began to have difficulty getting around as though her coordination was deserting her and she slept a great deal more than usual.

She left us yesterday afternoon.

As with any pet, I am grateful for the time we had together.  She got a warm home, more than enough food (including items she would never have run across in her native Mongolia - or even at the pet store, for that matter) and materials to manipulate according to her instincts and imagination.  I got to observe the life and times of a gerbil genius and am grateful to have had the opportunity to do so.

A small life is not worth less just because it is small.  And I think I begin to understand what Myria means about all lifetimes being equal.  Each of them - mayfly, gerbil, human, tortoise - is exactly one lifetime long.