EMMA Olney, Gerbil Saviour of the North, is doing a quick check on how many of the little rodents she has.
"Eight, nine, ten," she says, going round the house to do a head count.
"We're getting full. We need to rehome them before we can take many more."
Until nine months ago there was one glaring gap in Britain's animal rescue and rehoming services.
"They do it for dogs, cats, rats, horses, donkeys, almost anything except gerbils so we thought, why not?" says Emma, from Nether Edge. And so Sheffield Gerbil Rescue was born.
'We' are Emma's hubbie Mark - "he just got caught along with the flow," she laughs, and children Kai, aged 10, and Fian, five. Baby Faith looks on.
They soon found there was a steady stream of people wanting to offload their gerbils.
"People can't look after them any more or their children get bored with them. We are not judgmental," says Emma.
"We take them and give them a safe place to stay until we can find a suitable place for them."
With the only other gerbil rescue service in Bath, Emma and Mark have found themselves going as far as Manchester and Lincolnshire to collect and rehome the animals.
Emma has always kept them. The rescue service when the family visited pet shops to buy some more. They found the gerbils alone in tanks when really they are very sociable animals.
"We get two males or two females together, bond them and rehome them as a pair," she explains. And the rewards can be great.
"They can be very affectionate. It depends on how you much handling you give them. You can get to the stage where a gerbil will purr and vibrate with pleasure in your hands."
She's currently looking for homes for Alfie and Charlie ("both quite skittish but with time and patience could soon adjust") and Smokey (a bit aggressive) who is a pair with Bandit.
With so many gerbils passing through the Olneys don't need one of their own but they do have one, Itsy, a rehomed animal which stayed.
It, too, was part of a pair, Itsy and Bitsy, but Bitsy lost an argument with a cat.
Emma charges a £5 "adoption fee" because "people value what they pay for" but she's prepared to haggle.
"We'll even take toilet rolls. Gerbils love shredding them to pieces," she says.
- Sheffield Gerbil Rescue is on 0114 255 8247.
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