The Great Migration

Newsletter 2026-03-16

The population of our house sadly dipped this week. Pixel is no more.

I got the text in front of my house as I got home from work. The kids had made the discovery only moments earlier. Their ancient guinea pig had been laying on his side that morning when they left for school. Betsy, my oldest daughter, had checked to make sure he was still breathing. He had been. But when they got home, he wasn’t. The girls took the news surprisingly well. It was their second guinea pig death. It also wasn’t unexpected. At the age of five, Pixel was the Methuselah of his species. I didn’t discover how unusual his age was until I took him to the vet and spent five times the price of a new guinea pig to have his eye checked out. He had accidentally poked himself with a piece of hay. Guinea pigs lead a dangerous life. Had I known how near he was to the end of his projected time on earth, I still probably would have spent the money. I’m not a good person, or even an okay one, but I take care of animals as best I can, much to my financial detriment. Pixel had two good eyes up until his final days, when we suspect he started to go blind. I hope he could see that we cared.

He had a better life than most guinea pigs. That didn’t stop him from being absolutely terrified every second of it. I often wondered how his guinea pig brain comprehended the world. Nothing in his evolutionary history said it should be okay to be randomly picked up and snuggled by giants, all while food magically appeared from the sky. He only stopped being scared in the last few months, when his eyes and possibly his ears gave out. He didn’t run when we tried to pick him up because he couldn’t see or hear us coming, but he also stopped fighting us when we caught him. For the first time, he was serene when held. He no longer had the tools to fend off our love, so he just accepted it. At the very end, he lost weight. That’s never good when you only weigh two pounds to start. There’s a reason there’s no such thing as guinea pig Ozempic. Pixel’s only job was to be rotund and adorable. He played his role well for half a decade. He will be missed.

From June 25, 2023, when the kids made took both guinea pigs to the basement during a tornado warning. No animal left behind.

With that, our guinea pig era is officially over. We didn’t enter it on purpose. We were gifted a free pair by Betsy’s friend’s mom, who thought the rodents weren’t getting the attention they deserved at her house. In our home, they got far more than they ever wanted. “Free” also turned out to be rather expensive once we bought the upgraded cage and accessories necessary to improve their lives. Every guinea pig needs a penthouse. Now that the guinea pigs are gone, they won’t be replaced. All of their stuff will be thrown away or donated, and the girls will suddenly have a huge new area of open real estate in their room. I have no doubt that, within days, it will be covered by clothes, both dirty and clean, which never quite make their way to the dresser or the hamper. Their room will be a little quieter but no less messy, which is always the way with children. Clutter grows to fill the size of the container, no matter how big or small it is.

With this latest animal death, we continue our steady march toward the day of no pets. My wife Lola and I got a pair of dogs in year two of our marriage. The first one passed away several years ago, and the other died last February. We’ve been dogless ever since, which is sad, but also somewhat hard to notice. Niko and our younger pig, Luna, became friends as soon as she arrived at our house eight years ago. She imitated him and barked at cars and people walking down the alley. She doesn’t do it as much now, but every once in a while, she’ll let loose a cascade of decidedly un-piglike sounds, much to the delight of all. The pigs also rubbed off on Niko. In his later years, the small dog would fight the pigs for fruit and vegetable scraps that we dumped in the yard for them. He made Luna a guard dog, and she made him a herbivore. Be careful who you let influence your life.

Our pig era is having more trouble winding down. Mini-swine are supposed to live around twenty years. Our first pig, Gilly, was born in 2016. Barring catastrophe, she should be here until around 2036. That’s still ten years in the future. Luna is two years younger than her, which pushes that no-pig date out to around 2038. Then there’s Onyx, the mini-pig sized elephant in the room. He’s even younger than Luna. He’s also not supposed to be here. If we don’t take action, I have a sneaking suspicion his era might last forever. When Lola and I die, Onyx will be the one to inherit the house.

Onyx isn’t our pig. I specifically promised Lola that this arrangement was temporary when we took him in as a foster after his house burned down. As of May, he will have been here for two years. His owners are still in contact, but infrequently. After two years, their house still isn’t finished. For the first year, virtually nothing was done on the house. They fired that contractor. A new contractor made fast progress, then stopped. They fired that contractor, too. They have yet to find contractor number three. That has to be the final straw. We need to find a permanent home for Onyx. There’s two problems with that: 1) He’s not ours to give away; 2) Nobody wants him. It’s a good thing he can’t read because that last part might hurt his feelings.

There are various pig rescues out there. They’re all overflowing with discarded animals. There are far too many people who take in pigs they can’t care for or who expect them to stay smaller than they really are. Onyx has a foster home. Most animal rescues would prefer that he stays here. I wish that were possible. Unfortunately, he’s never fully integrated into our family. He doesn’t get along with our other pigs, as much as I want him to. Maybe it’s because he spent too much time being spoiled in a one-pig household, or perhaps it’s just his personality to be a jerk. Even social species have members on the less-social end of the spectrum. Humans are supposed to need other humans, yet there’s me. Even after two years, Onyx, Gilly, and Luna don’t sleep in the same piggy pile. Gilly and Luna are always one unit, and Onyx is the other. Pigs are strictly hierarchical. Onyx is the dominant one, but we have two herds, with the one-pig herd keeping the two-pig herd at a distance. Onyx lunges at the other two when we put them back in the pig room. He never physically hurts them—as far as I can tell—but he certainly makes them squeal like they’re dying. Pigs are never short on drama. They fit right in with the kids.

Onyx also doesn’t seem particularly happy here. After he had multiple accidents inside the house, we had to limit him to the pig room and the yard. He resents every time we let the other pigs into the rest of the house without him. He’d be the happiest in an arrangement where he could once again be a spoiled, solo pig. He’d love to go back to living with his original owner, who gave him the run of her house and let him get away with anything. The likelihood of that outcome has gone up and down over the last two years but is currently at an all-time low. Short of that, he should go to a farm or a house with some land where he could be outside by himself, maybe with some other, bigger farm animals, and with a heated shed to protect him from the elements. I’ve been looking for that sort of arrangement for two years and I’ve yet to find it. Nobody wants a full-grown pot belly pig with behavior problems. They’d rather roll the dice with a piglet that they can ruin from scratch. At least then they’d know any problems were their own fault.

So far, we’ve only had a soft launch to the idea of permanently getting Onyx adopted by someone other than his original owner. We haven’t published his name on any public adoption websites or gone through any official organizations. It’s mostly been word of mouth. My idea was that, if the perfect situation popped up, I could present it to his real owners and get them to agree. Putting him out there as officially available is a different deal entirely. It’s time. With the news that there still isn’t a third contractor, it seems like we’re back on an indefinite time line. The problem is inertia. If I do nothing, Onyx stays here, and I avoid a hard conversation with his real owner. We’ve now gotten to spring, which is the easiest time to have him. He’ll be mostly outside for the next five months. He’s the most difficult in winter, when he’s cooped up in the pig room to stew. But if I don’t have that hard conversation, it’s hard on my other pigs. He’s also rather unpleasant to me. He screams every time I walk into the pig room, which he regards as his territory. That’s unfortunate, because that’s also home to the beer fridge, which is definitely my domain. Onyx’s owner and her family were supposed to come to visit this week but didn’t show up. That would have been the ideal time to have the conversation. Instead, I might need to have it by text. Onyx needs to find his forever home, and we need to be one more animal down. Emptying the nest is harder than it sounds.

There’s a downside to all this downsizing. I’m alarmed by the continuing passage of time. I can’t believe that Gilly, who was a piglet yesterday, is already roughly halfway through her expected lifespan. I also can’t believe the tiny children who helped me take her home are now practically grown up. This weekend, most of the conversations Lola and I had with our adult friends revolved around college strategies for Betsy. She needs to get credits now to save money later. I also need to help her get her driving hours so she’ll be even more independent. Twelve years from now, when we could, hypothetically, be pet-free, Betsy will be twenty-seven. By that age, Lola and I were married with two kids and two dogs. Twelve years down the road, Betsy could be building up a herd of her own. In that same year, our youngest, Waffle will be twenty-two. She’ll be just out of college and possibly planning a wedding or conquering the world or doing whatever else she puts her mind to. Our house could be abruptly empty of humans and animals within the same rotation around the sun. I’m not sure that I’m ready for that. We all handle the fear of abandonment in our own way. My brother-in-law and sister-in-law, Jerry and Alice, coped with it by having an extra kid seven years after their other one. I’m not even willing to get another long-term pet. But maybe, as we near the day of the last exit, I’ll get a series of short-term pets to ease the transition. That might be just enough activity to keep me from being too lonely. With my luck, those goldfish will probably live forever.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James