Chuzzlewit

Content warning: a brief mention of pet death in here, as well as talk of various slightly yucky bodily medical things.

This is Chuzzlewit. I suppose his first name must be Martin, but we never call him that. To us, he’s more often known as Chuzz, or Old Man, but we’ve been calling him the latter for about three years so he can’t have been particularly old when he first got that moniker. The wiry hair and the cigarette toned colours give him an old man vibe. Also, periodically, once every six weeks or so, Chuzz and I have a few words about ear wax.

He’s one of our twelve rescue guinea pigs and he lives with his partner Princess Peach, and neighbour Daphne (after Du Maurier), in his lovely open-top cage here in my study. These three are collectively known as ‘the study pigs’ while the rest of our piggie gangs live in the second bedroom, just around the corner. We’ve had fuzzy Chuzz for a number of years and he’s a generally jolly little chap who never seems to want much out of life except curly kale, fresh hay and plenty of water (he drinks a lot of water and does so very noisily. We have words about that too). But as he continues to slide gracefully into his seemingly eternal old age, the ear wax thing gets worse.

It’s not his fault - its a common issue with his particular breed. He’s what’s known as a Teddy, the strain of the guinea pig DNA that gives him a wiry, bristly coat instead of smoothness and, apparently, a slightly wider nose. According to our vet, Teddy guinea pigs are prone to skin conditions and crusty ears caused by the over-abundance of ear wax, and so it has become my job to clean it out when it all gets a little too built up underneath those ridiculous elephant flaps. The process needs to be handled delicately because the inner ears of guinea pigs are quite sensitive, as Chuzz never fails to let me know. A dab of olive oil onto a cotton pad to soften things up and then some gentle wiping to get the worst of it out. Chuzz bears the treatment with good grace, for the most part, while I chatter on about how much more comfortable he’s going to be, and how much better that is now, isn’t it?

With us having so many animals in the house, all of whom were rescues from the RSPCA, it’s not uncommon for us to become like trainee vets, administering various medicines and treatments to all manner of ailments. We’ve given daily eye drops to a rabbit with bad cataracts, we’ve bathed rats with rare skin conditions, we’ve had a guinea pig with a respiratory issue who we placed inside a nebuliser every day for twenty minutes to help his breathing. We have a kitchen drawer full of drug paraphernalia, from syringes to stocks of Metacam, like something out of an Irvine Welsh novel. Most recently we had a little guinea pig lad called Batman who, sadly, had cancer and, even more sadly, chewed a hole into his tumour, opening it to the elements. It became my job to clean that out too.

Sorry, this is all turning quite squeamish and yuck. And yeah, it’s never pleasant per se, but there’s something curiously bonding about it all. We humans have a tendency to act first, think later when it comes to the animals we bring into our homes and lives. We allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by the cutesyness of the things and set aside the full reality of them being living, breathing, actual animals with all that actually and really and brutally entails. Sure, we know to take them to the vets when they get faulty, and we brace ourselves, for the most part, for their inevitable shutdown but all that is background noise to the puppy-dog eyes and delightful twitchy noses we initially behold with glee. This is not helped, of course, by our obsession with the pureness of animal breeds, especially with cats and dogs (and extra especially with dogs). A lot of us still desire that picture-perfect imagery of the Labrador or Persian or Lionhead, hence why the rescues tend to end up with all the mongrel no-breeds and the supposedly dull colours, such as black cats. In a quite lovely jab of irony, however, it is these purest bred types who’re most prone to sickliness having had certain features exaggerated and gene pools drained in favour of Instagrammable looks (not that Instagram existed when these breeds began, but you know what I mean). The one I always think of in these terms is the long-suffering Pug dog with its squashed up face and its eternal curse of not being able to breathe properly.

So while our House of Ailments can sometimes be trying (not least on our wallets), the actual process of attending to the sick does serve to remind us of the fragility of these creatures and the power (and obligation) we have to make their situations better, if we can. I grew quite attached to little Batman as I nursed his icky situation twice a day, every day, and because the treatment never seemed to cause him too much pain, I think he began to enjoy it too, to a degree. He’d always get a treat afterwards and a mouthful of the sugary medication he liked, and something meaningful would pass between us in the interaction. A few days before he died, I got him out of his cage for a pootle around and he came over and sat with me. He found my feet and settled down and let me stroke him. This is actually quite unusual for our guinea pigs - they tend to prefer to keep themselves to themselves and we try not to handle them too much because they're prey animals and handling goes somewhat against their nature. But Batman and I had found some sort of connection - perhaps I had become his Robin.

That’s not quite the case with Chuzz, but we get along OK. I like to think he watches me while I write, helps me out with a few turns of phrase or bits of wobbly syntax. He’s a wise old chap with a Dickensian spirit, he knows a few things beyond ear wax, I’m sure. Look, you see. This is what we do. Relentless cutesyfying and anthropomorphization, pasting over that deep, profound core of animalia where something like the act of writing prose is so unimaginably frivolous to be laughable. But that’s our sickness, as human beings: the constant need for everything to be explained. Perhaps pets are partly medication for ourselves.