Addison Independent, Monday, November 15, 2010 — PAGE 17

Gliders make sweet companionsStudent says miniature marsupials have full-size personalities

Giving pet a tag letsothers know it’s loved

(See Gliders, Page 18)

(See Tags, Page 19)

By TAMARA HILMESMIDDLEBURY — Though koalas

and kangaroos are generally outlawed as pets, there is another furry marsupial that the state of Vermont has deemed legal for regular citizens to own — sugar gliders.

Sugar gliders resemble a cross between a flying squirrel and a bush baby, and are a good alternative to a hamster, gerbil or guinea pig, according to Middlebury College senior and Short Shannon Street resident Frank Sweeney.

“It’s just the nicest little thing,” said Sweeney, the proud owner of two sugar gliders. “You feed it yogurt drops and it just hangs out on you and wants to be pet all the time.”

Sweeney, 21, first heard of cuddly pets that grow only as big as the size of one’s palm from his mother and sister, who happened upon a sugar glider vendor at a mall kiosk near their home in Canastota, N.Y. Sweeney’s sister, Caitie, immediately fell for the tiny creatures and ordered one from a Texas breeder named Priscilla she found online.

Sugar gliders did not enter the United States until 1993 and were originally imported from Australia. The Sweeneys got their first one this summer.

Foster, as they dubbed the first gliders, quickly became a family

favorite. Caitie claimed Foster as her own and began taking the nocturnal animal to school with her in a little fleece pouch. Foster would sleep peacefully in Caitie’s locker while she was in class.

“Foster Luna is her name,” Frank Sweeney said. “She was the original. She’s generation X.”

But Caitie Sweeney was not the only one who the little sugar glider managed to charm. Their mother, too,

could not get enough of the new pet. “My mom was like, ‘Oh, we need

to get more!’ because my mom is obsessive compulsive and needs 7 million animals to take care of,” Frank Sweeney said. “We have four dogs, a koi pond and we had two cats. And now we have six sugar gliders. No, five sugar gliders, excuse me. Five. One we gave away.”

The Sweeney family’s new obsession quickly became a slippery slope. They ordered a second glider just one week after receiving Foster. This time, Sweeney’s mom opted for a glider of the “platinum” variety.

“For the platinum one, the price isn’t listed on the website,” said Taryn Tilton, one of Frank’s housemates. “You have to call and ask.”

The all-white glider arrived the following week, but unlike Foster, whose mild temperament made her a friend of anyone she encountered, the new female was not quite so social.

“We subsequently named it Lucifer because it’s the meanest thing in the world,” Sweeney said. “First of all, it’s huge. It’s like the size of my face — huge. It’s a girl. You can’t even put your fingers near it — it starts crabbing.”

“Crabbing,” explained Sweeney, is the term for sugar glider crying.

“They sound like little raptors,”

FRAnk SwEEnEy

ADDISON COUNTY — Did you know that one out of every three pets will get lost in his lifetime? Each year the Addison County Humane Society takes in more than 500 lost or stray animals. Sadly, for many of these animals, the chance of reuniting them with their families never arrives.

The Addison County Humane Society is asking all pet owners to help us reduce the number of animals in our shelter and help us reunite your lost pets with your family. Almost ev-eryday, we have a dog or cat brought to our shelter as a stray and immediately, we know that this animal has been lost and their fam-ily is probably frantically searching for them.

Unfortunately, most of these animals do not have identification (pet tags or microchips), so we are forced to wait for the owner to contact us to report that they have lost their family pet. Even more distress-ing is that many of these animals’ owners do not contact us and thus they are separated from their fami-lies forever. To further complicate the issue, some frightened animals may travel several miles away from their homes, making it even less likely that their families will come searching for them.

An ID tag is your pet’s ticket home. If you’re lucky, a neighbor will find him and return him to you right away. But your pet could be picked up by a stranger or an animal control officer

and taken to a shelter. Without an ID tag, he/she could be mistaken for a homeless stray.

A tag tells the staff that your cat has an owner who loves him and wants him back.

Your pet’s tag should have your name, address, and a telephone num-ber where you can be easily reached. It is also a good idea to include sec-ond telephone number or the number of a friend or relative in case you are unavailable. Lastly, you should check your pet’s ID tag regularly to make

sure it’s still readable — a heavily scratched or broken tag won’t do any good. And, of course, if your contact information changes, you should up-date the tag immediately.

A second form of iden-tification is a microchip. A microchip is a small, electronic chip (approxi-mately the size of a grain of rice) that is implanted

just under your pet’s skin. It is ad-ministered quickly and painlessly by a simple injection. Microchips each have an identification number associated with them. Along with this ID number, your name, address, and phone number are entered into a computer database. If your pet gets lost, animal shelters or city pounds equipped with scanners will be able to scan your pet’s body to quickly lo-cate the ID number of the microchip along with the corresponding owner information. Most shelters and veter-

Pets need preventive medical careThis summer I took my cats, en

masse, to the vets’ to be checked after not having done so for four years, thinking that because they were indoors cats that they’d be in almost perfect health. Not so!

Several of the cats are older and needed extensive dental work, as it turned out they had been in silent pain for quite awhile.

Needless to say, this made me feel terrible! It also cost quite a lot of money, none of which I begrudge to the wonderful team at my animal hospital.

I would like to recommend, though, that in order to avoid having your pets and check books go through all this, to take your

animal in yearly as a combination check-up/prevention trip. It will make for both a happy pet and a happy owner. Pets need not be expensive if you take care of them properly. Also, ask your vet about credit plans, I found out about one that allows you to charge your pet’s (and your) health care should you be dead broke.

I know that some people are giving up their pets because they think that they’re too expensive to take care of. That’s a dreadful thing to do to an animal that has come to love and depend on you. Please don’t dump your animals.

Carolyn Van Vleck new Haven

Your pet’s tag should have your name, address, and a telephone number where you can be easily reached.

Pet StyleWhat’s your ?

LOOKING ANXIOUS, FOSTER, the Sweeney family’s first sugar glider, sits on a branch in daylight. Typically, these Australian marsupials sleep throughout the day and only move around at night.

Caitie Sweeney

PAGE 18 — Addison Independent, Monday, November 15, 2010

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added Tilton, mimicking the raspy shriek.

But the crabbing seemed to be the least of their worries when it came to dealing with Lucifer the glider.

“You can’t even put your body near it or like touch it at all because it’s crazy,” Sweeney said. “It lunges out and bites you and it drew blood from my mom and sister. And we still have it because Foster, the original one, loves it. They get along so well. And that’s why we had to keep it. Lucifer loves Foster and Foster loves Lucifer.”

Despite the bond that the two gliders had formed, Sweeney’s mom still tried to trade in the demonic second glider at one point. So she called up Priscilla, but rather than take back Lucifer, the breeder offered to, instead, send another glider at no charge.

“She didn’t charge us because we’re good customers,” he said. “Because we bought two in two weeks. So she’s said, ‘Oh, you can have more,’ and my sister got a third baby, Sookie. And Sookie’s so cute.

Gliders(Continued from Page 17) She’s the cutest of all of them.”

DRAMA QUEENSThough small in size, the sugar

gliders have big personalities.“Lucifer’s like Regina George

from ‘Mean Girls,’ you know what I mean?” Sweeney said. “They all get

along with her. I think Foster’s Karen — let’s make this about ‘Mean Girls.’ Foster is Karen, Lucifer is Regina and Sookie is Gretchen.”

Like the popular 2004 film “Mean Girls,” life with the sugar gliders is full of a particular brand of drama.

“Once my sister wanted to let Sookie out, so she put her out in the bathroom because that’s a pretty closed in area and didn’t think she could get into anywhere, but somehow Sookie managed to squeeze into the smallest space

between the countertop and the wall.”

At the pleas of Sweeney’s sister and mother, Sweeney’s dad ripped the countertop off the wall in order to save Sookie.

“We had to redo our whole bathroom,” Sweeney said.

But renovation costs did not

deter the family from ordering two additional sugar gliders from Priscilla at the end of the summer. When Middlebury’s fall semester began, Romulus and Remus, twin male gliders returned to campus with Sweeney.

“When the twins came in, (housemate) Victoria and I drove down to Albany to pick them up from the airport,” he said. “They came in this big, live animal box and the (shipping attendant) wouldn’t touch it because she said, ‘Some people had

one of these and it got out and ran out into the parking lot.’”

Frank later found out that “those people,” were actually his parents. Sookie had escaped from her box when they had gone to pick her up

(See Nocturnals, Page 19)

“Gerbils, you can’t really pet. Hamsters, you can’t really pet. Sugar gliders, you can pet and cuddle with them. So, out of the small, furry animal world, they’re definitely the best. But they’re also the highest maintenance.”

— Frank SweeneyROMULUS AND REMUS live with Middlebury College senior Frank Sweeney in his home on Short Shannon

Street. According to Sweeney, sugar gliders like these make good pets for someone who needs more love than a hamster can give, but less work than a dog requires.

Caitie Sweeney

Addison Independent, Monday, November 15, 2010 — PAGE 19

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Nocturnals(Continued from Page 18)

weeks before.“Apparently, she terrorized the

airport,” he said, adding that they were just lucky it had not been Lucifer.LIVING WITH GLIDERS

The twins, on the other hand, have been very well behaved thus far, according to their owner. They mostly sleep during the day and “hang out,” lying curled up on the arms and stomachs of Sweeney and his housemates. Because the nocturnal gliders prefer warm, dark places, they have a tendency to crawl into people’s shirts, he said.

At night, the gliders come alive — they “fly” back and forth across their cage, and run on their exercise wheel at impressively high speeds.

“I sleep through anything, so it isn’t a big deal, but they’re nocturnal, too, and they just wake up at night and go on that little wheel thing forever,” said Tilton, whose room is across the hall from the cage.

“It would be cool if they weren’t nocturnal and hung out during the day,” Sweeney said.

Sugar gliders can be trained to be “day walkers” as Sweeney called them, but Tilton shook her head at the idea.

“That sounds terrible,” she said. “What if you had to only live during the night? That would be so sad. Especially in the winter. I would shoot myself. I wouldn’t eat apple or mango.”

Fresh mango is the food of choice for the sugar gliders, though Sweeney and Tilton experimented with several different fruits while getting to know

their littlest housemates. “You’re supposed to feed

them mangoes and stuff, but those aren’t available in Middlebury so we fed them apples, because it’s the fall in Middlebury and there are apples everywhere and it’s free,” Sweeney said. “And we thought, they’ll learn to like them. But they never learned to like them. So we kind of half-starved them. Then we started feeding

them oranges and then they were so much happier and loved life.”

Gliders also eat yogurt drops and a special diet supplement invented by the breeder, Priscilla.

Along with their special diet, gliders also require a heat lamp and heat rock, fleece sleeping pouches and a cage. Unlike with hamsters or guinea pigs, the gliders’ cage does not need to be lined with shavings, and according to Tilton, it ends up smelling a lot less. But according to Sweeney, gliders top typical small pets in several other ways.

“Think about small, furry animals,” Sweeney said. “Gerbils, you can’t really pet. Hamsters, you can’t really pet. Sugar gliders, you can pet and cuddle with them. So, out of the small, furry animal world, they’re definitely the best. But they’re also the highest maintenance.”

Sweeney prefers the marsupial gliders to pets of the rodent variety, as they tend to love their owners back in a way that guinea pigs and hamsters do not.

“They definitely bond to particular people,” Tilton said. She explained that when Foster came to visit, she particularly favored their friend Katie.

Before purchasing a sugar glider of one’s own, a person better be absolutely sure about making the commitment. Gliders can live until they are 12 or 15 years old. But for the right people, a glider can be a perfect companion.

“They ain’t no dog,” Sweeney said. “But I think that if you had kids, and if you wanted an animal that was easy to take care of, you should get one. They are really cute, and if you get them young, they bond to you and are well behaved. Lucifer is not a good one. So you know that it can go both ways. But if you get a good one, they are so cute and won’t do anything to hurt you and will be really good with kids.”

Though sugar gliders may not be in the running for man’s new best

inary offices are equipped to handle microchips.

The Addison County Humane Society strongly suggests that all pets (including indoor cats) have identifi-cation. Additionally, we suggest that you use both a pet tag and a micro-chip to ensure that you can be located if your pet is lost.

Identification tags are your pet’s first ticket home while microchips provide an extra level of protection in case your pet loses his collar and tags. Providing your cat or dog with both tags and a microchip can help ensure a happy reunion if the un-thinkable happens and your compan-ion gets lost.

Lastly, some people are often con-cerned about putting a collar on their cat, for fear that the collar may get caught on something and inadver-tently injure their cat. However, there are several collar made specifically for cats to ward against such injuries. Such collars include a breakaway collar, which has a fastener that au-tomatically releases when it’s pulled.

Since these fasteners don’t click into a locked position, they allow your cat to slip free if the collar gets snagged on window blinds, furniture, or fenc-ing. Similarly, other breakaway col-lars feature a short length of elastic fabric woven into the collar that ex-pands when you tug it. This kind of collar will also release your cat if he gets caught on an object. The weight of his body, or pressure applied to the collar by tugging, stretches the elas-tic and lets him escape. You can find breakaway collars at most pet supply stores or online for about the same price as a regular collar.

In an effort to foster pet identifica-tion, the Addison County Humane Society sells pet tags that you can personalize with all of your infor-mation. Additionally, ACHS offers micro-chipping for $25.

It only takes a few minutes and your pet will be protected for a life-time.

Editor’s note: This story was pro-vided by Jackie Rose, executive direc-tor of the Addison County Humane Society.

Tags(Continued from Page 17)

friend, Sweeney still thinks they make for a good, relatively easy-to-care-for pet.

“They don’t compare to a dog,

but they do bark,” he said. “So that’s something.”

Tamara Hilmes is at tamarah@addisonindependent.com.

“It would be cool if they weren’t nocturnal and hung out during the day.”

— Frank Sweeney

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PAGE 20 — Addison Independent, Monday, November 15, 2010

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