Gerbil Population Control

About a year ago my daughter, Hannah, purchased a pair of young gerbils. Unfortunately, their nether parts were not fully developed at the time and we ended up with a male and female. As is the wont of the rodent world, it wasn't too long before two gerbils became 8. And then 18. In short, we had an embarrassment of gerbil riches.

Hannah tried mightily to give her gerbils to all the local pet stores. They were full up, no doubt with the offerings of other hapless gerbil owners. So several of her friends had gerbils bestowed upon them as birthday gifts or because the said children were successful in nagging their parents into getting some too.

When all was said and done, and Hannah had also bestowed three male gerbils upon a younger sister as a birthday gift, we still had too many gerbils and keeping the males and females separate was becoming something of a problem. The older males and females had been separated successfully, but sibling-like, they objected to sharing their living quarters with younger sisters or brothers. To the point of death.

To spare her younger brothers and sisters the trauma of gerbil fratricide, (and possibly to prevent them from getting any ideas of new ways to deal with sibling rivalry), Hannah decided to take things into her own hands. For a very brief time she considered letting the dogs eat them, but decided this was too gruesome an end for them. Instead, she placed several of the males who could get along in a kleenex box with some kleenex, food, and water, and took them out into the deeps of the woods, in the middle of our Canadian winter, with the idea that dying in the cold was a more merciful end than the quick snap of the jaws or a bonk on the head.

Imagine Hannah's surprise next day when she returned to the scene of pre-meditated euthanasia to find that the gerbils, deciding that they preferred to live free and wild instead of dying in fluff, had burrowed under the stump of a tree and dragged all the free bedding and food in after them. And so they continue to live. Hannah and the other children bring them free offerings of seeds, nuts and water on a daily basis and the gerbils continue to populate our woods and have even expanded their living quarters into a few tunnels to other parts of the country.

Thankfully, there are none of the fair sex with them so we won't need to host an annual gerbil hunt to keep down the population.