Pookie or, how I learned to start worrying and fear the claw

The shows always had several star animals. These were the creatures that made people take a second look, as well as ask [stupid] questions. When I say "stupid", I'm not calling questions in general stupid. I love questions. They show people are listening. I'm talking about questions that you would only dream up if at some point in your life, you wore a football helmet outside of a football game. Things like, "LOL SO SUP BRO YO YOU FEED THIS ANIMAL LIKE ICECREAM AND SHIT?". No, Fuckwit, it doesn't. Why the fuck would I feed it icecream? At what moment in your day did you wake up, look around, and decide that it would be a good idea to feed animals icecream? Go go public education!

One of these animals was a mountain coatimundi named Pookie. Now, coatis are one of my all-time favourite animals. They're like the bastard child of an ant eater and a raccoon. How cool is that? Pretty damn spiffy, in my opinion. If memory serves right, we raised pookie from either the first week or first month- practically from birth. Coatis are the sweetest things until puberty, at which point they grow goat horns and develop a taste for babies, and Pookie was no exception.

Pookie had a stage presence. A very good stage presence. From the time that he was just a little tyke until the time he was nearly full-grown, he had always been one of the huge parts of the act; Sweetie the mara, Elvis the king snake, and Pookie the LOL SUP MATE THAT THERE'S A MONKEY AINT IT I KNOWS IT A LEMUR OR SOME SHIT.

He had a harness and a leash, and his job entailed walking around in front of the audience and wiggling his snout. Pookie did this well, as no matter how many times we brought him out, people would still be just as thrilled. Mind you, this is an animal which is more of a pest in its native habitat [akin to an opossum in the United States].

Nobody ever seemed to ask absurdly stupid questions about Pook. There would be the parents trying to impress their kids by confusing him with a different animal, but that's about it. Compared to poor Sweetie being mistaken for everything from a jackalope to a kangaroo, he had it easy. We, on the other hand, were slowly realising that giving Pookie fame would give Pookie a god complex.

That's right, Pookie thought himself god. Not a loving god, no. He was to his handler what the Aztec sun god was to virgins. Long claws, sharp claws, and canine teeth that om nom nom'd at least two mobile phones and an arm- Pookie's weapons of choice. Over the course of a month, give or take, Pookie transformed from a teddy bear to a minion of Hell itself. This wasn't a huge shock, as he was coming to maturity and I've only seen one coati who wasn't batshit [to be fair though, he was a tortured petting zoo veteran who had been declawed and defanged], but it did complicate things slightly.

Getting hold of new animals, let alone new animals that can hold the stage like Pookie did, is no easy task. Hundreds of dollars, sometimes more, for ownership alone. As a small animal will never be as exciting as a large one, you've also got hundreds more going out for an enclosure. Specialised diets, climate control, and specialised vet bills eat through your wallet quickly. I'm not even going to think about all the time it takes to research the animal to the point of expertise, then to take that information and make it into something that will be understood and received well by an average first grader. Therefore, we tried to make Pookie last as long as possible.

Soon, getting him out of his carrier was a spectacle in itself. Putting his harness on was five minutes and a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, and sometimes I get Vietnam War flashbacks about going into his enclosure at home to either feed or clean. I didn't even fight in fucking Vietnam. That should tell you just how traumatic it all was.

When we quit, Pookie had not been replaced. You can't replace him. Reptiles are covered by one of the other performers, domestic animals are dull as shitcunt, and primates are too costly. Pookie's lunacy, though painful in every way for handlers, only raised his appeal for the naive audience who thought it was funny bunny as hell to watch. I want to stay true to the title of this blog and say that I put on a cowboy hat, riding Pookie out of the belly of a B52 bomber, but truth be told if I did that, there would be a crowd of fat tourists with ADHD children flinging bodily fluids all over the place and asking me to do it in every show. That's just not cost-effective.

Wasn't that lovely,
-Happy little badger