In memory of the Unnamed Gerbil

My husband notified me this morning that our remaining gerbil passed away last night. You see, he lived well beyond the 2-3 year average of most gerbils. He lived four good, long years. We fed him expensive gourmet gerbil food, constantly provided him with chew items, refrained from holding him too much and left him to sleep all day and all night in the cool basement. He was the offspring of a second litter of gerbils. We were told when we originally bought two gerbils 5 years ago, that we had two females. When one of those died, we replaced it with what we thought was another female (it's not easy to differentiate between the sexes...more on that later). Well...five weeks later when Chandler was cleaning out the cage, we found five little babies. I immediately went online to research how to take care of baby gerbils...you know, I needed to be an expert. First thing it said was not to separate the male and female because the male actually is the one to take care of the babies. Well, that was good because I wasn't sure which one was the male anyway. But then what I read next was alarming. The information also informed me that immediately after giving birth, the couple will mate again! WHAT?! Those animals! So...five weeks later we had yet another batch of gerbils. Forget the advice, Chris and I decided to separate all the males and females...what do we look like? A gerbil factory? No money in that, I say. I again went online to learn how to determine the difference between a male and a female...the difference being not as obvious as you would think. So Chris and I had the fun task of picking up each gerbil and studying their backside and hoping that we were distinguishing them properly. We ended up with two cages of 6 gerbils each...which, became a very stinky & expensive operation. When Chandler's room would get warm, it was especially atrocious. That's when we decided to put them in the basement.

Anyhow, that's the story of our gerbils. And now, it has come to an end with the passing of what we thought might be an immortal gerbil. We are grateful for the opportunity we had to care for these animals but are even more grateful that it has come to a quiet end.

Our advice...just don't do it!