Pet shop boys

TH has awakened me--suddenly, with loudness and startling full-body contact--two mornings in a row at the buttcrack of dawn to talk to me about blue-tongued skinks. He's been online, doing research, reading all he could find out about them. We alighted on the skink because he wants a reptile or amphibian, and most of them require live food. Crickets, mealworms, waxworms, the like. That's fine, except that unless I want to culture mealworms myself, which I guess I could do, we have to drive to the pet store at least once a week and buy squiggly food. The skink, however, is an omnivore, and I was kind of looking forward to offloading old salad stuff on the thing. Perhaps it would show us its blue tongue as a reward.

Then, we found out that they "require" a four-foot-long habitat. As in, about as tall as Dubya, except horizontally on some nonexistent surface somewhere in our house.

And then we found out that they cost about 160 bucks, at least here in brutally, blisteringly hot Austin, Tex., which somewhere in the ~30 years I've known it has lost its cool.

I wasn't too pro on the skink thing, really, because I don't really think herps and people fit together that well, even though I love love love herps. Social animals domesticate better than the nonsocial kinds, which is why we get along so well with dogs and rats. Speaking of dogs, anyone seen Up? Squirrel!!

Speaking of rats, we were scoping out the local pet stores today on a quest for the perfect family pet after ruling out the blue-tongued skink, and we encountered a capybara on a leash at a PetSmart. For those out of the loop on the Rodentia taxon, the capybara is the world's largest rodent. By large, we mean that this thing could easily have taken on the labrador retriever that was barking at it in the store. The dog was at first confused, thinking that the capybara must be a dog. Then it got a whiff--one that must have loudly spoken of "Big Rodent" in the language of animal chemical signaling--and the lab went off as though it had seen...well...a rat. In a way, I guess it might have been like that labrador's worst nightmare, a rat that could beat the crap out of it.

But I digress. We sought a new pet on this excursion. We had a pet once, a dog who's left behind as her legacy the URL of this blog. Since then, we've had fish and hermit crabs, some of which have departed to the great Whelk Shell in the Sky. We've promised TH for a long time that when he turned 8, we'd consider a pet of his own.

The votes are in, and currently, we've got a three-way tie among Rat (Parents, Little), Tarantula (Dubya), and Frog (TH). TH also has lobbied for days for a centipede, followed by his serious Blue-tongued Skink Campaign of '09. Given that we, the parents, must purchase the food et al. for said pet, we're leaning firmly toward the kind of pet whose food is available in packaging that has the word "chow" on it. That translates into "rat," this time in the language of Parents Who Must Pay for Pet Food.