Useless Pets

My lovely daughter brought home a turtle found wandering in six inches of snow. Turns out it's a Russian Tortoise, or Agrionemys horsfieldii ( Testudo horsfieldii), and there are web sites dedicated to these silly things.

Eventually I figured out why it was wandering in the snow...this is the most useless pet ever.

First we had to bring it to a veterinarian. Naturally you can't bring a Russian Tortoise to just any vet, it has to go to a specialist in exotic creatures a couple towns away from us. In the waiting room I enjoyed a caged pigeon and a ferret eyeing each other.

We'd named the tortoise Phoebe, but the vet happily showed us Phoebe was really a Phil, an experience I don't ever want to repeat. The rest of the session was kind of a blur, and my wife made sure I didn't see the amount of the check she wrote out.

My daughter spent a fortune buying Phil a cage and heat lamps, and we sat back to watch him. And you know what, Agrionemys horsfieldii didn't do a thing.

You can't teach it tricks. It can't catch a Frisbee. It doesn't roll over. It doesn't fetch. It doesn't chase mice. It doesn't bark and warn you if the house is on fire or a bad guy snuck in. It's not very bright, and spends useless hours banging it's head on the glass cage trying to get out. If you let it out of the cage, it tries to hide under something. If you so much as twitch a muscle it freezes and pulls it's head under it's shell. Best of all, these little horrors are loaded with salmonella, so every time you touch it, you have to scrub your hands.

To top it off, they're picky. The temperature and humidity in their cage has to be just right. They require a certain kind of sand and hay, can only eat certain kinds of plants, have to soaked occasionally in an inch or two of water (my daughter explained why and I immediately forgot). They have to go to the vet for regular checkups and their feces examined for parasites. Yuck!

I'm sure someone got tired of fecal parasites and scrubbing their hands for salmonella. Snow? Ahh, the damn thing will hibernate.