The Chinchilla Expert

by Brian Hioe

There’s a raccoon in the Taipei Zoo who’d previously been the mascot of a cafe, but was neglected and then abandoned by its owner. One also sees exotic dogs in the streets here, obviously former pets who’ve just been cast out. Living creatures can be treated like toys, it seems.

The other day, I discovered that a store near me in Bangka sells chinchillas. Of course, I had to go. I never pass up an opportunity to see a cute animal, even if I harbor certain doubts about whether such animals should be kept in captivity.

To my surprise, it wasn’t the kind of pet store where you could browse and look at different animals on your own. I had imagined there would be a few chinchillas, alongside a number of other potential pets. But no, it turned out that they specialized exclusively in chinchillas. What followed was an intense 30-minute conversation with the store owner, a man who was clearly in his early 20s but somehow owned a store full of chinchillas. He seemed to assume that I had researched chinchillas ahead of time before venturing into his shop, rather than having randomly seen an ad on Instagram and wandering over because I live nearby, as was the case. I wound up pretending I knew much more about chinchillas, their varieties, habits, and care than I did. It felt as though it would have been excruciatingly awkward if I admitted to knowing nothing about chinchillas and having walked in despite that, so I tried to act otherwise. 

This man evidently had a genuine, deep, abiding passion for chinchillas. Why else would he plunk hundreds of thousands of NT on a store full of chinchillas, who need to be in a constantly air-conditioned environment, apparently? To be sure, he struck me as probably some rich kid, but even so, it would take quite a lot of drive and focus to open a brick-and-mortar store devoted to chinchillas, and to sit there, surrounded by chinchillas, day in and day out.