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.

Welcome

My blog takes its name from a line in W.B. Yeats' "The Lake Isle of Innisfree":

I WILL arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,	5
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;	10
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

The poem is "about" many things, but chief among them is the conflict between the speaker's desire to escape society, connect with nature, and live life on his own terms and his recognition that this process is only possible in his imagination. On the one hand, the poem's message is uplifting; even as we are trapped in an urban jungle of gray pavement, our minds are free to go elsewhere. On the other hand, Yeats reminds us that we carry the burdens of society with us even as we try to distance ourselves from it. We seek solace in the bee-loud glade, but quickly turn it into a construction site and confine the bees to an artificial hive.

This blog is my way of exploring these kinds of contradictions. I'm a poet whose work remains largely unpublished, a country girl living in the city, an animal lover who still eats meat from time to time, a teacher who grades student papers yet would prefer to see all grades abolished, a health-conscious individual who nevertheless suffers from chronic illness, and a socialist who, lacking summer employment, has delved into the world of pay per click, marketing surveys, paid reviews, and other trappings of Internet capitalism. I'll explore all of these topics here from time to time.