13 June 2003

Phil's Pocket Pets

It is Friday the Thirteenth and I am hoping for a great day. I may not get it. It is leaden gray again out there and threatening to rain once more. I swear I am living closer to Edgeware Road in London than slightly north of Route Fifty in Arlington, Virginia. The atmosphere has weight to it and I suspect it will shed it all over us later. The local news says we will have flood warnings until midnight. Things are more unpleasant elsewhere. The Palestinian situation would be appalling if it hadn't happened so often before. I listened in incredulity when Vicki Barker took on an Arab spokeswoman on the BBC World Update this morning over the outrageous claim that President Bush, or anyone, for that matter, had never condemned the killing of Palestinian civilians.

The Roadmap to Peace thus far has brought about three dozen dead in a week. Peace is a hard road and I do not know if we are all going to travel very far down it on this initiative. Hal Gehman, the chief of the Columbia Shuttle investigation announced that some frozen foam insulation might have caused the disaster.

Duh.

And Ireland, land of the hollow-eyed starving of the Great Famine, has become a fashionable destination for asylum seekers. It is a crazy world.

From one of the crazier parts came the saga of Phil's Pocket Pets and the Monkeypox. This morning three health care workers are reported sick from the Pox, which they may have contracted from patients. That would be a first, since the normal method of transmission is from animal-to-human, and not human-to-human. The Illinois Department of Agriculture prohibited the suburban Chicago pet distributor from selling animals until the status of their health is verified. Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich signed an executive order banning the sale, importation or display of prairie dogs and Gambian rats. All the previously infected people were around prairie dogs, and one apparently contracted it after handling a sick rabbit that had been at the Vet with an infected prairie dog.

The owners of Phil's Pocket Pets were not hiding, and even launched a bit of a charm offensive in the media in response to the news that they were the vector of the current outbreak. The owners are Shari and Phil Moberley. They live in Villa Park, Illinois. I don't know what the neighborhood looks like. It is one of the near suburbs of the Collar Counties around Chicago, midway between Batavia to th west and the Gold Coast on Lake Michigan. Wheaton is the nearest junction, if you need to find the neighborhood. The Moberley's operate the Pocket Pets industry out of their basement. They keep hundreds of animals down there. I think you can conjure a mental image of it. Even if it the basement was freshly painted and light and spacious, and I doubt it, the air is going to be redolent of large rodents of indeterminate origin. Pocket Pets. A Gambian Pouch Rat in the pocket. Not a very appetizing thought, but what do I know.

So long as I have you here, let me tell you something about the exotic animal business. The Gambian pouch rat, or Cricetomys gambianus, is said to resemble a gigantic hamster with storage pouches inside of each cheek. The exotic pet literature says when the pouches are full it gives the animal an adorable and comical face. If you like rats, they are said to have the ability to captivate your heart. They are big rats, the largest of the Murid family of rodents, up to a foot-and-a-half from tip of nose to base of the tail. The tail is about the same length. They weigh in at six pounds or more. They are colored in shades of gray to brown, with large ears and fine hair, which makes them look hairless. Appetizing thought.

Pouch rats have a natural range from Senegal to Central Sudan and down to South Africa. Their natural habitat, when not living in basements or living rooms in Illinois, are natural crevices and holes, termite mounds, or burrows. They can become very territorial, and if you are planning on having more than one of them, ensure they are both females. Males will fight to the death and are probably not the eco-lesson you want to convey to Junior. So if you don't have a Gambian death match in your family room, the rats can live up to ten years in captivity.

The dealers will tell you to invest some time in your pocket pet. If you don't, the rat will revert to its solitary ways and won't want to socialize with anyone, including you. The dealer I investigated recommended taking yor rat over to the homes of friends, on car rides, and generally introducing it to new stimulus and experiences. This regimen, the say, will tend to amelioriate the possibility of untoward occurrances.

So that is what the market is like just in pouch rats. In addition, Shari and Phil offer a full service line of exotics. Their inventory includes 578 hamsters, mice, hedgehogs, chinchillas and more. Plenty of opportunties for untoward occurances. One of which happened when a Wisconsin dealer called in mid-May and said some of the animals they got from Pocket Pets were sick.

Mid-May. That is a month ago. Three days after he was notified, Phil Moberley said he stopped selling prairie dogs. He had heard a little girl who had been bitten had been hospitalized with an unknown illness. Thinking the prairie dogs were possibly infected with tularemia, a common rodent disease, he sent some to an Oklahoma lab for testing. The results came back negative, according to good citizen Phil, but he decided to err on the side of caution and kill off more than seventy prairie dogs that remained in the dungeon. I mean the basement. But Shari and Phil had already sold over a hundred animals. And some of them were sold after they knew there was a problem.

Shari and Phil gave Illinois officials a list of all the folks to whom they had sold prairie dogs, Gambian rats or other exotic animals since April. The word on the street though is that you can trust the people in the exotic pets industry, which relies on gray market smuggling on the best of days, just about as far as you can throw them. And you can imagine the reaction of someone holding illegal animals to the news that the Feds are coming over for a little chat. If someone let the animals out the back door and got into the native squirrel population the disease could be almost impossible to control if it passes into other indigenous species.

Shari and Phil said they got the prairie dogs and Gambian rats from a dealer in Texas. They declined to name him, and said it was all in good faith and all three thought the animals were healthy. "It was nobody's fault," Shari was quoted by the AP. I could almost see her blinking back the tears of victimhood. "It wasn't our fault or the dealer's fault."

After the remaining animals have been tested, Shari and Phil will presumably be permitted to go back to selling animals out of the basement.

I honestly don't know what people are thinking sometimes. I'm not an animal activist. I am cooking bacon for breakfast and eat both kinds of white meat. I've worked on a beef ranch. I understand how the food chain works and support it heartily, since for the moment it stops short of me. But this is one hobby I don't understand.

Do you?