Jared Wasserman's parents aren't wild about his current crush. One recent morning as this long-lashed five-year-old sat tugging on his big toe in the pristine den of his parents' duplex, he announced he had fallen in love. "I'd like to marry Rudy," he said.
It is an interesting choice; Rudy is male and can't talk. He is Jared's hamster. Jared and Rudy, however, have not moved in together yet. This is because the parents Wasserman like having their home pet-free.
"I've never been an animal person," said Jared's mother, Marla Wasserman. "I could do without the flies."
Rudy is part of a small population of pets in New York that can be leased or adopted part-time. He lives in a cage with Jared's name on it in Manhattan at the Art Farm in the City, an indoor petting zoo and educational center that is home to 15 kinds of small creatures like millipedes and cockatiels, all of which can be rented yearly for US$100 (for a tarantula or a frog) to US$300 (for a chinchilla or rabbit, which require more upkeep). In general they live at the Art Farm and make occasional visits to their part-time owners' homes.
If a short-term adoption of a pet is what you're after, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, among others, offers dogs and cats for this purpose; elsewhere in New York City, rabbits and snakes and even ducks are available, often gratis, to part-time caretakers.
Pets in New York City are both privileged and pitied. While often pampered to the point of fetishization by their owners, they are also often more familiar with the feeling of sisal and concrete underfoot than gravel and grass. But even for animal lovers, city pets are usually more difficult to keep than their country cousins. There are the small apartments, the roommates, the building regulations, the allergies and the lack of outdoor spaces. So New Yorkers who cannot live without the footsteps of a millipede or the purr of a cat are turning to part-time solutions.
"My roommate is sort of so-so on the whole pet thing," said Abby Zidle, 35, an editor at Harlequin Books and a longtime cat lover, who said she has taken about five temporary cats in the course of the past few years from the ASPCA, usually for a month at a time, or until her roommate says enough.
"Cats get bored," she said. "You need to care for them a lot, and I think sometimes people don't recognize how involved it can get. Getting a pet for a shorter amount of time can therefore just be easier."
Although the ASPCA said that animal fostering programs are available in nearly all of the 5,000 shelters it helps support around the country, the organization has found that the dense population of both people and stray animals in urban areas makes these programs far more popular in cities than elsewhere. Valentina Van Hise, a co-founder of the Art Farm, said that its part-time pet program is the only one she knows of.
"It's something that appeals to people in the city because people are in smaller spaces with busier lives and parents are just like, `I don't want to deal with having this thing in my home all the time,'" Van Hise said.
Sean Casey, the owner and founder of Sean Casey Animal Rescue in Brooklyn, has adopted out everything from wallabies to alligators and currently has cats, parakeets, hairless rats and a dozen other types of animals ready for adoption or part-time foster care. He said corn snakes and rat snakes are the ones people ask for the most. Cats and dogs tend to be the animals that are returned the fastest because they require more work and training than people expect.
Casey said he tries hard to screen out anyone who might take animals for dishonorable reasons, but he cannot always be sure someone is not just taking a puppy for a day or two in order to pick up women in the park. "I've turned away people who say they want a snake for a few days so they can freak out their roommates," he said. "Or one woman asked me for a bird temporarily because she felt her cat was bored and needed something to swat at."
Most of the people who come to him simply want to have a pet for whom they will not have to completely rearrange their lives. He said 85 percent of his clients are single.
Singles have started exploring the Art Farm in the City's creatures as well. Van Hise said that one adult recently looked into renting a pet because her boyfriend wants a dog but she doesn't feel comfortable with animals. "She was thinking about getting a part-time chinchilla," Van Hise said, "so that she can learn to have animals around her."
Parents like the Wassermans can avail themselves of part-time pets to put their children's promises of care and upkeep to the test.
Van Hise, who was inspired to start offering part-time pets earlier this year after hearing too many children beg their parents to take animals from the petting zoo home, knows parents don't want the bother of pets, and for that reason the Art Farm staff does all the caretaking. They do let part-time pet owners help with chores when they visit.
Of course as soon as these unsavory tasks are not compulsory, they become alluring. "We think, `Who would want to clean a cage?"' Van Hise said. "But the kids want to change the water and clean. They like taking care of the animals."
Six children have taken a part-time animal at the Art Farm since the animals started being rented four months ago; another six families are considering enrolling in the program in the fall.
So far the children have not lost interest and continue to visit about twice a week.
If anything, they get too attached. "Some kids don't like to see other kids playing with their animal," Van Hise said. "So we explain that it lives here, and other kids can play with it. Your name is on the cage, so it's yours, but you have to share."
Occasionally, when Van Hise feels especially comfortable with the part-time pet owners, she'll let them take the animal home for a short stay. Jared and his sister, Alison, who live on the Upper East Side, were allowed to bring Rudy home, at no extra charge.
After struggling to get the cage into a cab and getting home, lots of pictures were taken of Jared, in pajamas, cuddling Rudy on the kitchen floor. He brought the pictures to school for show and tell, and gave one to his teacher as a gift. Then two days later Rudy returned to Van Hise.
"I just kept thinking how they're part of the rodent family," Marla Wasserman said. "When I brought him back, Valentina said, `You're welcome to keep him longer,' but I said `No, it's time for him to come back here now."'
March 24 to March 30 When Yang Bing-yi (楊秉彝) needed a name for his new cooking oil shop in 1958, he first thought of honoring his previous employer, Heng Tai Fung (恆泰豐). The owner, Wang Yi-fu (王伊夫), had taken care of him over the previous 10 years, shortly after the native of Shanxi Province arrived in Taiwan in 1948 as a penniless 21 year old. His oil supplier was called Din Mei (鼎美), so he simply combined the names. Over the next decade, Yang and his wife Lai Pen-mei (賴盆妹) built up a booming business delivering oil to shops and
Indigenous Truku doctor Yuci (Bokeh Kosang), who resents his father for forcing him to learn their traditional way of life, clashes head to head in this film with his younger brother Siring (Umin Boya), who just wants to live off the land like his ancestors did. Hunter Brothers (獵人兄弟) opens with Yuci as the man of the hour as the village celebrates him getting into medical school, but then his father (Nolay Piho) wakes the brothers up in the middle of the night to go hunting. Siring is eager, but Yuci isn’t. Their mother (Ibix Buyang) begs her husband to let
The Taipei Times last week reported that the Control Yuan said it had been “left with no choice” but to ask the Constitutional Court to rule on the constitutionality of the central government budget, which left it without a budget. Lost in the outrage over the cuts to defense and to the Constitutional Court were the cuts to the Control Yuan, whose operating budget was slashed by 96 percent. It is unable even to pay its utility bills, and in the press conference it convened on the issue, said that its department directors were paying out of pocket for gasoline
On March 13 President William Lai (賴清德) gave a national security speech noting the 20th year since the passing of China’s Anti-Secession Law (反分裂國家法) in March 2005 that laid the legal groundwork for an invasion of Taiwan. That law, and other subsequent ones, are merely political theater created by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to have something to point to so they can claim “we have to do it, it is the law.” The president’s speech was somber and said: “By its actions, China already satisfies the definition of a ‘foreign hostile force’ as provided in the Anti-Infiltration Act, which unlike
RSS