Pet Spotlight

I'm an equal opportunity animal lover. In other words, I react in the same sappy way to a tarantula as I do to a puppy ("Awww, look at your little furry legs!"). Even the most cold-blooded creature warms the cockles of my heart. In the past seven years, I've been owned by a green anole, a leopard gecko, a Russian tortoise, a Syrian hamster, six mice, two hairless rats, two Chinese button quail, three hermit crabs, two bettas, two African dwarf frogs, two Oriental firebelly toads, a fiddler crab, an apple snail, a ghost shrimp, three Madagascar hissing cockroaches, a banana slug, and a medicinal leech (the partridge in a pear tree is still on back order.) Perhaps the only thing they all have in common is that they are all small, caged critters who fit easily into a one-bedroom apartment where more traditional pets are not always allowed.

Many of my pets lived to their maximum lifespan, while some were the victims of random catastrophes, a previous owner's neglect, my own ignorance, or simply a lack of available information. In this series of posts, I'll be sharing both my successes and my failures, in the hopes of educating others.

As much as I love pets, I spend a lot of time trying to convince people not to buy them. When I walk into a pet store and hear an employee giving customers misleading information or outright lies in order to sell them the most expensive and exotic creature in their inventory, I can't help but speak up. I've been banned from more than one store just for revealing what an animal really eats or how big an animal will actually get.

Pet ownership raises no shortage of ethical issues. I certainly don't have all the answers, but here are a few basic principles I follow:

1. I no longer remove animals from the wild or purchase them from people who do. I say "no longer" because my first pet was a green anole, whom I thought was captive bred but turned out not to be. I won't be making that mistake again. I've taken in injured or displaced wild animals occasionally but only to place them in the care of a wildlife rehabilitator. I've also taken in rescues that were originally wild caught but had been in captivity so long that they could not be released back into their natural habitat.

2. I don't purchase animals from pet stores or anyone who breeds for profit. Responsible breeding, where the welfare of the animals and the improvement of the species are the top priorities, is expensive, time-consuming, and rarely more than a hobby. With the exception of the aforementioned anole, who was purchased at a fair (not recommended), all of my pets were either rescues or purchased from small private breeders.

3. I don't breed my pets. Procreation may be natural but that doesn't mean it's necessary, and taking simple steps to prevent critters from multiplying can actually increase their lifespan. There are plenty of experienced breeders out there and countless unwanted pets who need homes, so I have no desire to join the ranks of the former or contribute to the latter. To be honest, I feel the same way about breeding humans, but that's another post.