For many years Camera Girl has been legendary among her friends and family for keeping an actual menagerie of varied pets. She has kept insects, arachnids, crustaceans, mollusks, worms, marine invertebrates, salt and fresh water fish, frogs and toads, salamanders, various lizards, snakes, turtles (mostly tortoises), parakeets, canaries, finches, gerbils, hamsters, guinea pigs, rabbits and decades of dogs (everything from Newfoundlands and basset hounds to miniature long haired dachshunds and German short haired pointers). She even has adopted some local wild life having become a close friend to a crow pair (Moe and Flo), an acquaintance of a raven pair (Poe and Mrs. Poe) and a witness to the frightening visitations of a pair of hawks that habitually pick off the less cautious mourning doves at Camera Girl’s feeders. So, it goes without saying that she’s no amateur at keeping critters.
This week it was decided that in deference to Princess Sack of Potatoes’ summer sleep over schedule, her request to add a hamster to the local zoo would be granted. Now why the present rodent in resident (guinea pig Laylee) isn’t sufficient representation for that phylogenetic order (Rodentia) in the house I could not say. But youth must be served so we headed off into the rain today to bring home a handleable (and cute) representative of Mesocricetus auratus also known as the Syrian hamster who will forthwith be known as “Chucky.”
And we were successful in finding Chucky and establishing her bona fides vis-à-vis “nipping” and were requesting the sales help to package Chucky for the trip home when a catch appeared. We were asked to provide “proof of enclosure.” Now this is a New England thing. The states here are more concerned with the rights and privileges of hamsters than they are with the rights of people. And it’s not even close. So, what these two young people wanted was a photo on a phone showing the cage that Chucky would inhabit when we got her home. Now Camera Girl and I both travel through life “sans phone.” Other than a land line back at the Compound we are solely connected to the world around us through sounds produced by our mouths without any electronic amplification. So, no phone, no pictures of a hamster cage.
This floored the young sales staff. They said it was forbidden to send out a hamster without proof of enclosure! I thought this was hilarious but Camera Girl was incensed. Basically, they were accusing her of not knowing how to keep a hamster which from her point of view was a deadly insult. She began describing in gory detail the dietary, housing and psychological regimen for hamsters that she had learned over the years. She demanded to speak to the manager and know why this requirement had not been communicated over the phone when she had called earlier to find a hamster at the store. The young sales staff were noticeably chastened and retreated to the manager’s office for more instruction. And of course, the manager used discretion noting that the “proof of enclosure” was understood to be a way of ensuring that novice keepers didn’t get home with their pets and promptly lose them because of inadequate housing. And of course, Chucky was promptly packaged and purchased and headed home with us.
But on the way home I quickly adapted the scenario into a variant of the Seinfeld episode “Soup Nazi.” In my version it became “Pet Nazi” with a short mustached tyrant in a Pet Smart uniform shouting to customers who wanted to buy hamsters without cage photos, “No hamster for you! Next!!!!
And this was a comical event but just multiply this aspect of life by a thousand and you get an idea of the suffocating nature of life in the nanny states of New England.