I have a cat. When I was younger, I had a guinea pig.
I treat my writing like a day job, like my main job, even if for many years I was doing other jobs to pay the bills. I worked as a copy editor. I was a medical guinea pig. I was an eBay power seller of ladies' handbags. I was an assistant to a bookie at the horse races. I bartended. I did anything I could to make ends meet.
From the practical point of view, the susceptibility to infection of the guinea pig proved to be the most useful step forward. Today, all laboratories use this animal for preserving the virus.
I have two Iceland horses, a very hairy dog called Looney, and a guinea pig.
We're going to be focusing our science on things that will take us farther and longer into space. For many of those experiments, the crew members are human guinea pigs, which is fine; that's part of my job. I don't mind being a human guinea pig.