A guinea pig urinated on my hand yesterday. Well, not
directly on my hand. I was holding it inside a cloth sack to avoid the
possibility of getting scratched or bitten and it urinated inside the sack.
Since the sack was about the thickness of a pillow case, this was tantamount to
getting urinated on directly.
No, we did not purchase a guinea pig as a pet. (We have a
large, marginally unhinged cat in our house, which would probably try to
swallow a guinea pig whole and end up hacking up the world’s largest hairball.)
I took my six-year-old and four-year-old sons to a “Meet the Creatures” class
offered by the City of Chandler at their Environmental Education Center at
Veteran’s Oasis Park. And by “meet” I mean hold and possibly get urinated upon.
The class, offered weekly throughout the summer, is run by a
couple who are animal rescue experts. During the first five to ten minutes of
the class participants learn about the various animals in the room and how to
handle them. The “how to handle them” portion of the lecture is of particular
importance, so that one might learn which pets are okay with being picked up
(like the urinating guinea pig) and which ones can be petted but not picked up
(like the bunny the size of a warthog, which we were told would kick you in the
chest with the force of an MMA contestant if you tried to lift if off the
ground.)
The animals featured at the class ran the gamut from common
things such as the aforementioned guinea pig and rabbit, to more exotic animals
like a wallaby and a paca. I got to hold the wallaby (also in a sack, but
thankfully non-urinating) which was kind of cool. I mean, short of hopping a
quick 20-hour flight to Australia and bushwhacking my way into the outback,
when else will I get a chance to get up close and personal with a wallaby?
While I had the pleasure of holding the urinating guinea pig
and the dry wallaby, my sons were a bit more skittish about handling the
animals. They seemed much more content letting me hold the animals while they
gingerly pet or brushed them. My six-year-old did, however, hold a small turtle
about the size of a drink coaster. When the turtle tucked its head into the
shell my son commented that it looked like a sandwich, but he passed on my
suggestion that he take a bite out of it.
One animal that both I, and my sons, kept at a healthy
distance was the flying gecko. I don’t know if “flying gecko” is what it’s
actually called—it probably has a slightly fancier name that I didn’t quite
catch—but the point is that it was a gecko much larger and more exotic than
your garden variety gecko, and more importantly, we were told during the
orientation that it sometimes jumps on people’s faces. Yup, we were told by the
woman running the class that we could hold the gecko, but it may—without any
provocation—jump on your face. She said—and I quote—“if you’re not comfortable
with it jumping on your face, you may not want to hold it.” I would have thought
that the majority of people (at least sane people) would not have been
comfortable with an eight-inch lizard launching itself toward their
eyes/nose/mouth, but apparently I was mistaken on that count. Most of the
people in the class—both children and adults—seemed perfectly fine handling the
kamikaze reptile (and interestingly, it didn’t face-plant anyone the entire
time) but the Schwartzberg men kept a safe distance at all times.
At the end of the class we thanked the instructors, lathered
ourselves in several quarts worth of hand sanitizer, and went on our merry way.
The memories of this class may last a lifetime, but, thankfully, the scent of guinea
pig piss goes away in a couple of hours.
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