Ranching small stock

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, natural history, livestock

This isn't quite "the Coal Miner's Daughter", but The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter by Holly Robinson is indeed a book of the author's life and hard times. Halfway through a Navy career, Holly's father Donald Robinson, Jr. began to plan for post-Navy life. As much out of curiosity as anything, he purchased four breeding pairs of gerbils, or "Mongolian pocket kangaroos" as his wife Sally called them. It didn't take long for eight little rodents to become 200, by which time the garage was filled with cages.

The book is a double biography, half on the author and half on her father, and one could say, half on the charming critters. It soon becomes clear that a lot of the charm vanishes when you must 1) care for fifty or more cages full of gerbils, 2) cope with the smells, and 3) carry this out in utmost secrecy. Don Robinson had a mortal fear that, should his side enterprise be discovered by "the Brass", he'd be cashiered.

This image and lots of information, in both Dutch and English, can be found at The Mongolian Gerbil by Peter Maas. On his "Appearance" page, he refers us to The Gerbils Color Palette, where the image below provides a clickable entree to a great many varieties.

Holly has a natural affinity for animals, though her great love is horses. She was her father's chosen successor, but declined. She spent her growing-up years caring for gerbils. The "gerbil farm" had to be sold out and re-established twice, as the family was moved by the Navy to Kansas (!) and then Massachusetts, where Don's Navy career could be safely concluded. There he developed the gerbil business in earnest. He'd already had book published, and scientific articles about their propensity for seizures.

At its height, Tumblebrook Farm housed about 9,000 gerbils. Even after retiring from the Navy, the proprietor maintained secrecy, partly from habit and partly because of the rising influence of those sympathetic to small animals; he had become a major supplier to medical testing laboratories. Better to have rumors of "rat ranching" get about than have PETA or someone raise a ruckus about "cute, sweet gerbils" being sent to labs to be subject to "cruel experimentation".

Holly deftly weaves her own coming-of-age narrative into the stories of her parents and brothers, how she and the boys each rebelled in characteristic ways. Particularly touching is Holly's collusion with an employee to "save" a run of pale-colored "sports" from euthanasia; the other girl would take them home to raise for the pet trade. I'd like to have known whether this originated one of the paler varieties, but there is silence on that.

Once Don had become the largest supplier of lab gerbils, he began to think of retirement; he'd raised rodents for 25 years, and his kids were all independent. He sold the business to another large supplier who had a much smaller gerbil line, but who was the largest supplier of several other small rodent breeds, particularly germ-free animals. Thus the last large family rodent ranch vanished into corporate-scale operations.

Holly became a writer—and what else can you do with her kind of background? She'd at first majored in Biology, with thoughts of becoming a physician, but a few months working for one of her professors convinced her to focus on her more artistic leanings. The book's Author blurb states that she and her husband are in the midst of raising their five children. I guess after caring for a few thousand gerbils, and helping her mother care for a stable-full of rescued horses of similar total mass, having five kids is the easy part!