Turtles, lizards and my other pets

     As a kid growing up I always had multiple animals, which included box turtles, little water turtles that I kept in a fish bowl and many chameleons, a hamster and my chicken (Peep Peep the City Chicken), which is in a previous post and of course our dog Trixie.  The chameleons (lizards) used to come with a little string around it’s neck and a clip that would fasten to your shirt so they could climb around without getting lost.  I doubt that you will find these anymore I'm sure that would be considered cruel nowadays.  Chameleons would change colors depending on the color of the surface they were on which was cool.  Their color change was slight which to me was a little disappointing because I expected an exact color match.  These were much smaller than the gecko’s you see on the TV commercials for Home Depot or Toyota.  The chameleons were available at any pet store and at carnivals but they never lived very long.

     We had 2 box turtles that lived in the basement and eat bugs, which was pretty common in those days.  We would throw some lettuce down to them occasionally, turtles need their veggies too, they can’t just live on bug meat. I’m sure we named the turtles but I don’t remember their names.  They were working turtles clearing the basement of bugs so I didn’t play with them like I did the little water turtles.  The box turtles didn’t like each other because they got into a big fight and chewed each others shell up and we got rid of one or it died I don’t remember exactly.  Maybe turtles are territorial I’m not sure or maybe there weren’t enough bugs or lettuce to go around.

     The water turtles were more fun to watch because they seemed more active.  I kept them in a fish bowl with some rocks to climb on as well as pool of water to swim around in.  At times I would have 3 or 4 in the bowl, which turned out to be a problem when they would climb up on each other and escape the fish bowl.  It was hard to find those little buggers when they crawled under the bed or some other obscure place. 

     I also had a hamster but mine had a nasty temperament and didn’t like to be handled by a young boy.  I guess I didn’t have a gentle touch with it.  The hamster bit me once so that kind of changed my interest in it but I didn’t tell my parents that he bit me because I was afraid they would get rid of it.  He died a few weeks after the bite so I informed my parents then and they took the corpse to get checked for rabies but nothing was found. 

    Our dog Trixie was the family pet we had for many years but she had to be put down in her later years when a tumor was discovered on her stomach.  Just as today our pets were part of he family but I don’t remember ever dressing them up in clothes or costumes like people do today.