Question #12

[fbhjr]

This is in answer to the frozendoll meme I started earlier.

#12) Your pets past and present
We don’t have any right now. So, that’s quick.

I have already written about the dogs I’ve had. So, I won’t repeat that here.

The first pet I remember having was a turtle. The pet store closest to our house (but still a good 20 minute drive) sold these little turtles and my mother bought one for both my brother and me.
We had a little turtle dish for them that had a section with water, a ramp up to some gravel and a fake palm tree. We had a tube of turtle food to sprinkle in with them.
For reasons never clear to me, these turtles had a very high mortality rate. They died after about a week and my mother replaced them. This was repeated every week for about a month before my mother gave up and we had no more turtles.
I was maybe 5 or 6 when this was going on and remember asking m mother why they died.
“They just die,” she said. And, I’ve never had a better answer to that question.
45 years later, I still feel bad for the little turtles. I can still remember what they smelled like when we brought them home from the pet store in their little boxes.
Wish we had done better by them.

In college my roommate Alan and I both had pet lizards. Mine was what the pet store called a curly tail lizard I named Zod. Al’s was a golden skink that liked to sit on people and remain still. My (now) wife would wear Al’s lizard as a bracelet some times.
Zod on the other hand was totally hyper. He’s leap away from you and go shooting across the room to climb anything he could climb. Often one of my roommates.
At the time we lived in the roach infested fire trap. Zod did his best on the first issue. He chased roaches all over the place. He’d bang his head on the glass of his tank trying to get out to chase more of them.
When he finally died, I tried to replace him with an iguana. I only had it for a week when I came home from work and found it had committed suicide. It had burrowed under its sunning rock, stuck its head in the hole, and then kicked out the supports.
(Al went on to get one too. He had it for many years until one day it trapped his wife and daughter in a bed room and wouldn’t let them out. Then, he got rid of it. We took care of that one a couple of times. It was a large and fairly aggressive iguana.)

Then there was the snake.
My wife used to be a quality control inspector for a hard drive company. She worked the third shift for many years. (We live where we live because it was very close to that plant where she worked so going in at 10:30 at night she would have a short drive.)
One of her coworkers was from south east Asia. She was going through a divorce and there was something of a bidding war between her and her husband over the affection of their son.
The son wanted a pet snake. His mother bought him a boa constrictor.
A short time later when he was bored with it, she wanted to get rid of it.
Her first thought was just to set it free in her apartment complex. We thought that a bad idea both for the snake and for the people around her. So, we offered to take the snake.
But, she gave it to her Buddhist temple. (She drove their van for them as apparently driving in the Boston area is not consistent with Buddhist monks lives.)
But, two weeks later (coincident with live food time for the snake) the monks gave it back.
So, she gave it to us.
We took it thinking “we’ve got friends who work at the local science museum, we’ll just pass it on to them.”
That did not work. Apparently in the early 90’s there was an overabundance of snakes looking for homes. We had not known that, and now had a pet snake.
At first she was OK. She was not aggressive and you could take her out and she’d wrap herself around you for warmth.
But, we had been misinformed about how many rats she ate a month. Or, more precisely, the size of the rats involved. So, we over fed her quite a bit the first year and she grew much longer.
Once we realized we put her on a diet.
And, she never forgave us for that.
She became much more aggressive and would attack me when I tried to clean her cage. (And, trust me, snake poop needs to be cleaned up. It is very nasty.)
We had her for around 10 years when one day her food won the fight.
I can’t say I was all that sad.

We have not had a pet since and that was 12 or so years ago.

Comments

[ravena-kade.livejournal.com]

The food the sold with turtles back then had very little in nutritional value for the little guys. Many, many passed away.

[fbhjr.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I figured something like that.

[cissa.livejournal.com]

Yeah- I had some turtles that lived a pretty long time- way past when I was bored with them- and they ate earthworms in the summer and chicken liver doused with vitamins in the winter.