Being Mr. Kenny

When I was little, we bought a guinea pig for my sister’s birthday. This guinea pig had rosettas in its fur, and my sister called these “Bonks”, and thus her name became Sally Bonkers. Sally lived with us for many years, longer than most of her peers. She died at the age of 9, and was much missed and mourned by us all.

Before that sad day, however, she met a male guinea pig, whom we were looking after for the weekend. Inevitably, nature took its course, and soon we had a litter of tiny guinea pigs. Piglets, if you will. Tiny, hairy, squeaking piglets.

But alas they died. They always died. It is the curse of life, and yet its greatest blessing, that all creatures meets their ineluctable ends, only to begin again immediately.

As is often the way with nature, incest abounded, and the babies just kept coming as siblings became parents faster than we could identify which were male and which were female. This horrible mass of inbreeding lasted several years, and we must have had 25 guinea pigs in total. I even made a family tree.

And so it went until we grew up and moved house, and the unfettered reproductive reign finally faultered and ended. The last surviving pig was a brown guinea pig that was the daughter, or grand-daughter, or niece (or, most likely, a combination of all three) of Sally Bonkers, the grand matriarch who began the entire story. We kept her in the garage until one day she escaped and was never found again. Never found, that is, until the day my father decided to consign the junk that surrounded the hutch to the city dump. There, beneath the cupboards, a deflated and mouldering body was discovered. There, the unmistakable shape of our last guinea pig was found. She had made her final resting place beneath the cupboards, and had died.

By then we were so used to the cycle of life and death that no-one was sad at her passing. We just popped her onto the bonfire. I don’t even remember her name.

So let this be a message to you all, you who keep rodents as pets. You shall all know the joy of new life, and the sting of death. Unless of course you can tell one sex from the other, in which case you are better owners than we. And here is the end of the message.