The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter

by Holly Robinson

  Donna’s father was a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force, and she attended eight different schools before he retired. “I was shy to begin with, so moving was really hard for me,” she confesses.

  She attributes her passion for animals to that Air Force upbringing. “It took years of begging to get one parakeet because we moved around so much.” In 1999, she bought her first gerbils at a pet store on a whim, “for the kids.”

  Today, Donna is a gerbil guru. Her website, ABC Gerbils, earns hundreds of hits daily. Through the years she has bred for gentle temperament and special colors, and to eliminate seizures and other common, naturally occurring health problems in gerbils. Her latest mission is to acquire a blue gerbil; she’s excited because a gerbil-loving buddy of hers who is traveling to Iraq has promised to bring her one.

  “We don’t have any blue gerbils in the States yet,” she says. “They have them in Europe, but they aren’t willing to give them up.” She laughs. “European gerbil societies, like the National Gerbil Society in Britain, think that Americans jump into things too quickly. Like, we’ve already made ‘mottled’ an official color category, but that’s still provisional for them. The British gerbil breeders seem to think that we Americans are loose cannons.”

  THE world of gerbil fanciers is underground unless you look for it, a mostly online community that gathers twice a year for shows. The American Gerbil Society didn’t exist when Dad started his farm, but many of its members have heard of him. My father ended up selling his inbred line of Tumblebrook Farm gerbils to Charles River Laboratories, which continues to provide them to scientists around the world for research studies. Charles River is the Microsoft of laboratory animal companies; these days it’s headed up by Jim Foster, Henry’s son, named “Entrepreneur of the Year” by Forbes magazine in 2002, the same year that Charles River was named “Company of the Year” by the Boston Globe.

  Jim led the company’s foray into providing preclinical testing services for pharmaceutical companies, recognizing that with new techniques using computer models and cell cultures, the need for disease research on live animals is rapidly diminishing. In the past five years, Charles River’s laboratory animal business has declined from 80 percent of its profits to just 40 percent.

  Terrence Fisher, the man who sealed the original deal with Dad, agreed to meet with me last year when I called and expressed curiosity about where our gerbils had ended up. I drove to the main headquarters of Charles River in Wilmington, Massachusetts. Fisher, the general manager of business development and surgical services for North American research models, is a small man but moves like a professional athlete. He bounces on the balls of his feet with his shoulders thrown back; when it emerged later that he was in the military until joining Charles River in 1979, I wasn’t surprised.

  My father’s gerbils—or rather, a germ-free line of their descendants—are housed not in Wilmington but in a separate facility in Kingston, New York, because of government regulations. But Fisher gave me a tour of one of the animal buildings, and I breathed in the familiar pungent smells of rodents, wood shavings, and food pellets. The food and water bottles looked just like ours. So did the racks of clear cages with wire tops.

  On closer inspection, though, Charles River is a completely different kind of laboratory animal facility. Tumblebrook Farm was mostly a family business, a farm of sorts. We often had gerbils running loose; curious escapees would come and sit on my foot while I was cleaning cages, and I’d scoop them up and toss them back into a cage. Our workers were spotty sweepers, too, so there was always a scattering of shavings and pellets on the floor.

  The Charles River floors are freshly painted and surgically clean, even with more than 187,000 mice and rats living in the one building I saw. The food at Charles River is irradiated and then placed into vacuum-sealed bags to keep it free of contaminants. The air the animals breathe is filtered. So is the water they drink. The rodents are housed in isolation tanks—separate rooms within the larger building that are created by plastic walls, with perhaps two dozen cages in each. The workers wear surgical scrubs and never come into skin-to-skin contact with their rodent charges.

  To do anything with the animals, the caretakers have to insert their arms into giant plastic sleeves built into isolation tank walls and attached to unnervingly bright green gloves. As an added precaution against disease, Charles River inserts “nude sentinels” into the colonies. These are rodents with no immune systems who act like canaries in a coal mine.

  Because the isolator tanks at Charles River are pressurized, occasionally the plastic sleeves and gloves pop out of them when they’re not in use and they start waving about in the aisles like ghosts. The workers must be used to this strange sight, but I walked carefully down the center of every aisle behind Terrence Fisher, not wanting to feel those cold green plastic fingers on my face or shoulder. There was something too cold and sterile about it all; I couldn’t even imagine holding one of these mice. Maybe, for the workers, that made their jobs easier, I thought: not being able to feel the warmth of the animals in their hands.

  As Fisher walked me to the door of the building, a sudden rain shower sent sheets of water across the parking lot. We stood around for a while beneath the awning, waiting for the rain to let up, and I asked Fisher if he remembered meeting my father.

  “Of course,” he said. “I went out to Tumblebrook Farm several times. That was quite a place you people had.”

  “What was my dad like?”

  Fisher’s answer surprised me. “He was a very soft-spoken man,” he said. “Very gentle and never in a hurry.”

  “Do you remember anything else about him?”

  Fisher grinned. “That man was absolutely in love with gerbils,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a man so immersed in his work.”

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “That’s my dad.”

  OUR family, like so many, is separated by geography now. My brother Philip studied Russian history, stopping just short of a doctorate. He now works at a large university, happily managing other people’s websites while dabbling in passions that range from playing the banjo to parsing sentences in Old Norse.

  My brother Donald moved to England for a job twenty years ago and is there still with his wife and two daughters. Contrary to all of our worst predictions for his future, Donald managed to make it through technical college studying biomedical engineering and, through sheer grit, intelligence, and energy, worked his way up to the post of technical sales manager for a large software company. His territory now covers much of Europe and Asia, and he makes so much money that he can say, with authority, that the more degrees you earn from universities, the less money you’re likely to make, holding my brother Phil and me up as prime examples. All three of us live in antique farmhouses.

  Until his death on January 10, 2009, my father lived in South Carolina with my mother, in a modest brick ranch house across the street from an elementary school. They were divorced shortly before he sold Tumblebrook Farm to Charles River, when the cumulative stress of their twenty-eight-year marriage finally was too much to bear. They spent eighteen years apart, and my father was married to another woman for most of that time. Then, quite suddenly, Dad left his second wife and my parents decided to marry again.

  “Better the devil you know,” Mom says, summing up their situation.

  Before his retirement from gerbil farming, Dad succeeded in accomplishing one last goal that was close to his heart: in 1987, he provided four pairs of his gerbils to Dr. Sigmund T. Rich in Los Angeles, the veterinarian who first encouraged my father to film gerbil seizures and write up his observations. Dr. Rich, whose life’s work involved cataloging the many different strains of gerbils in China, hand-carried my dad’s Tumblebrook Farm gerbils to Chinese researchers.

  Afterward, Dr. Rich wrote to my father:

  I want to thank you on behalf of our colleagues in China for your generous gift of four breeding pairs of your inbred strain. It gave me a very special feeling to hav
e the historic role of bringing them back to their native homeland after 52 years in Japanese and American laboratories. (I estimate 150 to 200 generations!?)

  HALFWAY into the afternoon at the American Gerbil Society show, there is an exciting announcement: “The Gerbil Olympics will begin in five minutes!”

  Tension builds fast as entrants scurry to line up their cages along a row of tables by the windows. Each owner is given a small paper cup to hold over the cage. At the count of “One, two, three!” the cups are dropped into the cages. The gerbils start chewing with great zeal, whittling down the cups at an amazing speed. The winner is the gerbil able to demolish more paper cup than any other competitor in the span of two minutes. As I watch the gerbil contenders chew, I think about how much my father would have loved being here.

  When Aidan and his friends are finally ready to leave the gerbil show, they run down the sidewalk to the parking lot ahead of me. As the boys buckle their seat belts in the car, they talk about the animals and which ones they’d like as pets.

  Jack wants a ferret because he’d like to set up a little hammock for it next to his bed. Patrick longs for a miniature hedgehog because the ones we saw at the show burrowed under bits of cloth called “hedgehog hats” and walked around like fuzzy turtles. Aidan announces that he liked the dwarf hamsters best because he doesn’t know anybody else who has them. He’s already scheming, plotting out arguments that might convince his father and me to agree to let him breed a colony of dwarf hamsters in his room.

  “I don’t want a gerbil, because I already know a lot about those,” he explains to his friends. “My grandfather used to raise them.”

  “How many gerbils did your grandfather have?” Jack wants to know.

  I glance into the rearview mirror and meet Aidan’s eyes. He grins at me. “Try to guess,” he says.

  THE author gratefully acknowledges the generous support of her agent, Richard Parks, the nicest man in New York, and of her friends, many of them writers and thoughtful critics despite the infinite demands of motherhood and jobs, especially Sharon Wright, Emily Ferrara, Susan Straight, Terri Giuliano Long, Elisabeth Brink, Virginia Smith, and Carla Panciera. I would also like to thank Jay Neugeboren, whose mentorship meant the world to me, and Lorraine Glennon, my first editor at Ladies’ Home Journal, who taught me more about writing than any graduate school could. I would like to extend a heartfelt thank-you to Julia Pastore, too, my clever, visionary, and thorough editor who helps writers see that some books can, and should, take a completely different shape from what we first had in mind. Finally, many thanks to members of the American Gerbil Society, especially to Donna Anastasi and Judith Block, for their own dedication to the remarkable gerbil and for their help in writing this book.

  HOLLY ROBINSON has been a contributing editor at Ladies’ Home Journal and Parents magazines, and her work has appeared in American Baby, The Boston Globe, Family Circle, FamilyFun, Fitness, Good Housekeeping, More, Parenting, Shape, and WorkingMother. She holds a B.A. in biology from Clark University and is a graduate of the M.F.A. program in creative writing at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In addition to her husband and their five children, she shares a home with two dogs, one cat, five fish, one gecko, and a Teddy Bear hamster. Visit her at AuthorHollyRobinson.com.

  The names and identifying characteristics of some individuals have been changed to protect their privacy.

  Copyright © 2009 by Holly Robinson

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Harmony Books,

  an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  Harmony Books is a registered trademark and the Harmony Books colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Judith H. Block for permission to reprint the poem “Twilight on the Gobi” by Judith H. Block, copyright © 2003 by Judith H. Block, http://www.geocities.com/Phoebe_art04. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Robinson, Holly, 1955–

  The gerbil farmer’s daughter / Holly Robinson. — 1st ed.

  1. Gerbils as pets—Anecdotes. 2. Gerbils—Breeding—Anecdotes.

  3. Robinson, D. G. (Donald Granville), 1928– 4. Robinson,

  Holly, 1955– I. Title.

  SF459.G4R63 2009

  636.935′83—dc22

  [B] 2008051449

  eISBN: 978-0-307-45982-4

  v3.0