My Strangest Pet

As some of my regular readers will know, I have been an animal lover for my entire life. I have kept -- or helped take of -- a wide variety of pets. This has included dogs, cats, guinea pigs, fancy mice, white rats, a rabbit, iguanas, chameleons, a basilisk lizard, a rainbow collared lizard, a cayman, box turtles, red-eared sliders and eastern painted turtles, a wide variety of freshwater fish and marine fish in aquariums ranging from five gallons to three hundred gallons in size, wild snakes of different species, frogs and toads, crabs and crayfish, salamanders, parakeets, canaries, Lady Gouldian Finches, a Sulphur-Crested Cockatoo, too many insects to mention, and I don't know what else.

No doubt the strangest "pet" which I have ever kept -- which lasted about two weeks -- was a bat which I caught decades ago while delivering newspapers in an apartment building as a young boy. This occurred in the middle of a cold, northern Winter -- or possibly early Spring -- and the bat was hanging on a window ledge inside of the building. I spied the creature as I was climbing the stairs while delivering my newspapers.

At first, I had no idea what it was. In fact, I thought that perhaps someone was playing a practical joke by placing a rubber mouse on the window; that is, until it slowly began to spread its clawed wings. OOPS!

Well, what was a young boy who had just found a near-frozen, little bat supposed to do? For me it was obvious. I knocked on one of my customer's doors. You can imagine the surprise and shock on my customers' faces when I asked them for a paper bag. They -- two young girls by the name of Janet and Donna Trybend -- inquired of me what the bag was for, and without hesitation I produced the bat for them in my hand.

EEK!!!

Well, maybe I am being a little overly dramatic. I think that Janet -- who was my first teenage crush as I recall -- was okay with it.

So, I took the furry, winged little guy home, promptly obtained a half-gallon milk carton, and stuck a tinker toy stick in the middle of it so that the bat could hang upside down in the dark. "That ought to make him quite happy" I figured. Boy was I naive!

Sadly, I was a young, dumb kid who didn't realize that bats must be in flight in order to eat insects. He stirred in the carton for at least a few days, but after throwing live flies into the milk carton for about two weeks, his silence finally made me realize that the poor bat had died. I don't know if his demise resulted from starvation, or if I had awoken him out of deep winter hibernation.

At any rate, there's my public confession after all of these years of carrying around such heavy guilt. Not really!