“Look, Mom”, I said and I was hardly able to talk, me and Jennifer were laughing so much, even though she was worried about Lumpy. “Look how stupid they look. They think they’re scaring the daylights out of Jennifer’s pig! I guess they just don’t realize how silly they look, waggling their bottoms like that, clicking their teeth. They’re a pair of clowns!”
“Ah, they’re exercising territorial imperative”, Mom said. Like she had just had a conversation with them, and knew all about it.
“What’s that, Mrs. Feldman?” Jennifer asked. I wouldn’t have. I wouldn’t give Mom the satisfaction of wanting to know. She doesn’t have to talk like that, so no one can understand.
“Well Jennifer, an animal feels very possessive of what he considers to be his personal territory. When a strange animals comes on the scene, most particularly onto the first animal’s territory, the first animal instinctively wants to protect his property rights.”
“Boy, how stupid can you get? It’s our property, not theirs. We just let them live here.”
“Don’t be silly, dear. You know perfectly well what I mean.”
“Do you think it’s all right for them to be together like this then, Mrs Feldman? Will they get friendly after a little while longer?:
“Probably, Jennifer. What I think would be a much better idea is to put them all on neutral territory. It’s very nice out now, all you need is your sweater. Why not take them into the backyard on the grass, so they can forget territorial hostilities? Then perhaps they’ll be more friendly to one another.”
“Okay, that’s a good idea, eh Jennifer?” I said. And she thought so too. So we did. I mean, we took the three of them outside and I made a little pen for them to stay in out of the old croquet hoops, and the short garden fencing.
But wouldn’t you know it, they just started to ignore each other! All the stupid - oh, pardon me, they’re not really stupid (not much!) - well, all they wanted to do was eat and eat and nibble on the grass, nothing else. Just like pigs. Not very sociable, actually. Very appropriately named, you might say.
“Hey, how would you like to see how I trained Lumpy?” Jennifer asked.
“Trained? You trained her to do something? My dad says Guinea pigs are too stupid to be trained to do anything but eat … and poop. But they do that naturally.”
“No, honestly. I’ve trained her to run after me. It didn’t take all that long, either. Whenever I take her out of her cage and put her down outside or something, like it’s somewhere that she doesn’t recognize, she’ll run after me. I taught her when she was small. Actually, I didn’t exactly teach her so much, it was just that the first few times she just kind of followed me. Now it gets so that if I move away and call her, she’ll come over. Or, if she doesn’t notice that I’ve gone away and then she doesn’t know where I am, I’ll call her and she follows my voice to get to me.”
“Hey, cool! Let’s see her do it, Jennifer.”
So she took Lumpy out of the wire enclosure and took her over to the middle of the backyard,and put her down. At first Lumpy just sat there, not even moving or anything. Then she put her head down and just started eating like she was starved, or something. Jennifer walked away and nothing happened, her pig just kept eating.
“Oh, darn. Sometimes she doesn’t notice. Like when she’s busy, eating.”
“That’s like always. They’re always busy eating.”
“No, really Jen, she does run after me. Wait a minute, you’ll see.”
“C’mon Lumpy, Lumpy, c’mon!”
Just when it looked like Jennifer was going to get mad at poor little Lumpy and I was ready to laugh it off, wouldn’t you know it, the little pig started waddling off in her direction with her head down, sniffing the grass. She was running in little spurts and twice stopped and did a little hop and a skip.
I just love it when they frolic like that. Munchkin and Grumpkin used to do that a lot when they were babies. Now they don’t do it so much. They’re getting to be old grumps. Just like kids playing, and then growing up to be serious people.
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