Pet of the Month

I’ll bet you didn’t know I own a penguin?

No, not the new Korean hybrid that gets 60 miles to the gallon: the half bird, half fish that is all the rage this year.
We call him ‘Stud’, which if you knew me, wouldn’t surprise you.
It has nothing to do with his procreative abilities, but came about in a typical round-about fashion.
The only penguin I knew, or at least knew of, before Stud, was Tennessee Tuxedo – a cartoon penguin from the Seventies, not a real one.
I can’t remember much about the cartoon, but when I hear the name Tennessee Tuxedo, the cartoon’s jingle replays in my brain.
So when he first arrived, and we let him out of his wooden box, and watched him amble about the house in what seemed a damn good imitation of the way John Wayne careened across the screen, Stud seemed the perfect name.
That is, like a thoroughbred, we named him Tennessee Stud, by way of Tennessee Tuxedo and John Wayne – and so ‘Stud’ for short.
Of course we liked the irony of the name too, as apart from his Wayne-like amble, Stud was decidedly un-masculine. Fish and birds have genders of course, but not in the same way that mammals do.
Know what I mean?
Actually maybe penguins can be masculine, but you wouldn’t think so.
You wouldn’t think penguins would make a good pet either, would you? Well, actually, they don’t.
But what makes a good pet does not necessarily make a popular pet.
Pets used to be companions, but I think that definition is passé, today. Now pets are like tattoos, or motorcycles, or painful piercings: a personal statement of general indifference to both the world at large, and other people in general.
What better way to say ‘screw you’ to the world, than by parading about with a strange pet that is no pet all.
Penguins are just the latest version of the Pot Bellied Pig, and the Ferret, and the Boa Constrictor.
Remember how cool it once was, to own a Constrictor? No?
When I was a boy, shy kids had Boa Constrictors. They couldn’t parade them about, but they could invite people into their rooms to watch as they fed them live rats.
Pets have always run interference for their owners. But in the past there was at least the illusion that pet owners loved, or admired, or appreciated their pets.
Not any more.
So anyway, whatever the cultural implications are, I’m excited to be the first one in town with his own pet penguin.
We’ve actually owned ‘Stud’ for a few years now, but we never used to tell anybody about him because we were concerned what they would think.
Now everybody wants to have their own penguin – and can’t.
It’s illegal, for the most part. You have to get a special permit, or run an aquarium, or a circus, or show proof you’re a working animator.
But our penguin Stud is grandfathered in: meaning that we got him before they had laws saying we couldn’t.
Kind of like Timothy Leary, doing LSD at Harvard before anybody knew anything about it.
I actually was thinking about naming our next penguin, if we could get one, Timothy, or Tiny Tim, or Tennessee Tim..
I actually started out thinking this column would be a kind of guide to having a penguin as a pet.
We’ve learned a lot since we got Stud
For the first few months we didn’t know that if penguins don’t get in the water for a long time, they get kind of mangy looking. We thought Stud was sick, but he was really just dirty, in a penguin way. All we had to do was get him his own little inflatable pool and, in a few weeks, he was back to his oily penguin self again.
And as an added bonus, we don’t have to take down the inflatable pools we buy every summer, when the cold weather hits. And now the grubs that live under it – in that moist, smelly mange that used to be uncut, waxy grass, along with the creatures that fall into the stagnant water, save us a lot of money that would otherwise go to feed Stud.
Fresh fish are way too expensive.
And most everything else we’ve tried to feed him – even bits of choice gristle left over after family barbeques, didn’t interest him at all.
He likes it live, and wriggling.
Once a neighbor brought over some live bait, put it in his pool, and sure enough he went right in after it.
But nowadays he’s kind of lackadaisical about his food.
I don’t know what age he is, in penguin years, but lately he has a permanent bored, stupefied, ‘I-stayed-up-real-late-watching-bad-movies’ kind of look.
I guess you can’t blame him.
My older son tells me that some of the local kids feed him Slim Jims and beer when we’re away for the weekend.
And apart from the occasional snow, his dirty little rubber pool, and the squeals of the neighbor’s twin two-year olds, South Plymouth is not very Antarctic-like.
To be honest, I don’t think Stud’s long for this world.
Maybe we’ll have one last neighborhood barbeque before the cold weather hits – so we can show him off. Then we’ll drive him down to the Long Pond landing, and leave the door open.
It’s really too bad.
Just when Penguins are hot, old Stud’s about to feel the Big Chill.
I’m thinking about getting a tattoo in his honor.
“Stud”, inked in a heavy, black, gothic font, right beneath the one I got when we came home from the Caribbean cruise and found “Art Gecko” had passed away.
I may be old and in the way, but I’ve always had cool pets.