We named our chinchilla Mujibur after the Sirajul and Mujibur that are featured on David Letterman. There's no other explanation other than that. My sister, her boyfriend Joel, Jeff, and I were all voyaging back to our place after purchasing a chinchilla from a pet store. We spent the ride back shouting out names for him until we finally landed on Mujibur. For a while, he was Chili Palmer (from Get Shorty). Mujibur just sounded cool.

Remembering Muji
When we first brought Mujibur home, he was shy, like most chinchillas with strangers. As he grew up, he became a very grumpy, angry chinchilla. I used to let him run around the bathroom for awhile. He loved to run and hop but hated to go back to his cage. Once home, he would shake his little fists and glare at me. At one point, Muji had to have eye drops put in twice a day for an infection. After he would get his medicine and returned to his cage, he would shake his little fists and then fold his arms in a huff.

Muji also bit every animal in the house. Ogden liked to play with him but if Muji charged Ogden, Ogden would always run. Muji liked this power. I babysat two cats for a friend. The cats stayed at our place. These cats were a bit more "street" than Ogden and definitely meaner. They were not afraid of Muji at all and spent the two weeks they were with us trying to figure out how to get him out of the cage and eat him. Muji did not like that they weren't afraid of him. He would leap onto the bars of the cage and shake the cage, trying to show them how mean he was. They didn't buy it.

Eventually, Muji calmed down. Every morning, as I walked into his room to feed him, he would stand on his hind legs and wait for me to scratch his belly. He loved his chin scratched, his head scratched, his armpits scratched, his head scratched, but not his backside, try as Jeff might. Daily scratchings lasted anywhere from 5 minutes to ten minutes, but it was always too short for Muji.

Muji decided that 3:00 am was the best time to redecorate his cage. He liked to pull his water bottle down and overturn his house. He had a two level cage with a ladder to get from one level to the next. His food bowl used to be on the top level (I thought that would keep it cleaner). Sometime during the night, he would take his bowl and push it down the ladder. Sometimes it would just slide down, most times it would overturn and spill all over. He also likes to throw his wood chew blocks out of the cage. I think he was trying to hit the cat.