Critters make for class fun
Pinehurst School, Albany, Auckland, Monday, 1.30pm.
THERE’S A scrabbling, scratching sound, and the cardboard box at the back of the classroom begins to rock back and forth slowly. Two boys in the back row are transfixed. Teacher Colin Chapman deploys his insurrection-quelling smile.
But mostly, Mr Chapman’s year six class at Pinehurst school are deeply attentive. This is much better than PE. Even the box is briefly forgotten as Sally Hibbard begins explaining who she is, and what she does. There’s not really a name for her profession: she’s the only person in New Zealand, she thinks, running mobile pet parties (petparty.co.nz), which combine children and animals and yet, she says, bring no drama, only pleasure.
‘‘Lots of kids ask ‘how do I get your job?’’’ says Hibbard. ‘‘I run animal career classes, but there’s not a course you can do to be me – I kinda invented the job myself.’’
Before any animals emerge, there’s some learning to be done.
‘‘What if we left you in your bedrooms forever and took everything away except one book, and once you’ve read it, all you can do is read it again?’’ Hibbard asks the kids. They ponder this, then, to general delight, get to work assembling an assault course of tunnels and little wooden houses for the first guests, the mice. They’re sold already. Then, in rapid succession, come the impassive bearded dragons, Mr Scalesworth and Mr Schofield, who nibble mesclun.
The guinea pigs, Ambrosius, Sergeant Snugglecake, Captain Caramel, who submit gracefully to hairstyling in exchange for carrots. ‘‘Do a Mohawk,’’ declares one boy. ‘‘Gonna be a rockstar.’’ Another emerges with a 1980s backcomb. The lizards and guinea pigs, Hibbard reckons, know the routine and that there’s food coming at the end, so the lizards have a tendency to lunge at people’s buttons thinking they are lunch.
Two blue-tongued skinks circulate. Two passing teachers stride past the window, halt, and wander inside. A nervous chinchilla (more hairs per follicle than any other animal, we learn) has a dustbath, but tries to bolt, and is removed. ‘‘I don’t offer them up as little animal entertainment sacrifices,’’ Hibbard explains later; any sign of stress and they go back to their cages.
There’s giggles at the chinchilla. Mr Chapman says: ‘‘Year six, voices down’’ and essays an impressive, wordless five-second countdown. Silence. Rewarded with the occupant of that mysterious mobile box, Yasmin, the 30-year old turtle. Just time for the tortoises to do a quick circuit before that delayed PE session. Then Hibbard lugs the eight crates and two boxes back to her white Ford Econovan (it requires precise packing, and keeping the rats and the guinea pigs apart, to prevent the former stealing the latter’s grooming blankets).
She’s always loved animals, did zoology and environmental sciences at university, and owned a pet store with an attached classroom. When she sold the store in 2003, she kept the classroom work. But she’d never planned to do the parties: people just kept asking. That was five years ago.
The parties have a universal appeal: boys love giving guinea pigs a hairstyle, girls love holding lizards. It only changes when a parent says ‘oh, my daughter is afraid of lizards’. Hibbard likes it when the parents goes away, and returns to see their child holding the lizard with a grin on their face.
She’s not, she says, a know-it-all: kids will often tell her strange facts they’ve learned on the Discovery Channel, but she won’t hesitate to tell people if they’re caring badly for their pets. Most, she says, like to know what they’re doing wrong.
Hibbard calls her job her interest: ‘‘I don’t say hobby: it’s more all-consuming that a hobby’’. She lives in a commercial building in Albany, her apartment on top, the hundred-odd animals below, complete with ponds and terrariums; stick insects, starfish, newts and fish to turtles, lizards, tortoises, chinchillas, squirrels, guinea pigs, rabbits, mice, two dogs who do an agility course, lots of birds.
Some donated, some ‘‘rescued’’, some bequeathed by a late zookeeper, only a handful bought. ‘‘They are my pets,’’ she says. ‘‘They are all pretty special. They’ve all got names. They are not working animals.’’
Going on holiday, then, isn’t really an option. ‘‘I have got people who would come and help but it’s not like saying ‘feed my cat’, it’s more ‘look after my zoo please’.’’