geckos

I just wanted to anounce the recent acquisition of a new lizard friend that is not a dinosuar and that is actually real and not an acrylic painting from my head. It's Calvin the leopard gecko! If you haven't met him, you should, because he's great. He doesn't look leopardy yet because he's young... so right now he's mostly orange with black markings. He has a log-cave and some rock structures in which he likes to hide, or crawl around on if he's feeling spry. He also has a jungle-leaf plant which he crawls up into sometimes, hiding. He eats live crickets (sorry crickets) and they must be delicious to him because he eats a lot. I'll put a picture here at a later time. Maybe I'll even paint a picture of him.

Pets are fun, but sometimes I feel bad about them. There is a difference, though, between caging a wild animal and having a pet that was born in captivity. The second doesn't know anything different; the cage and immediate surroundings are its world, and that's all it knows. And so the animal can enjoy its life. It would be amazing to have a wild animal for a pet, like a squirrel or chipmunk or something, but it already knows about life on its own and it would be too sad to contain it. I found a wild snail once and put it in a jar, but I either killed it or it went into hibernation or just lost its will to live... poor Cecil the snail.