If there were a Special Olympics for reptiles, my daughter’s pet bearded dragon would be a prime candidate.
My kids are allergic to anything with more than two legs and hair and they frequently bemoan the fact that they can’t have a pet dog or cat. A couple of years ago my son’s science teacher brought her pet corn snake to school and my son thought such a pet would be awesome. My wife wasn’t thrilled simply because it was a snake, but the boy begged and pleaded, so we caved in and got him one for Christmas.
In short, corn snakes make excellent pets. If your have kids with allergies then go for it. The setup costs aren’t small, but after that it is a breeze. You buy frozen mice and thaw one out once a week and feed it to him. If you wiggle the mouse around he’ll grab it and constrict the hell out of it before chomping it down, which is pretty cool to watch. We spend about $10 a month on frozen mice. So, feed him once a week, and he craps about once a week too.
Snakes aren’t slimy either. Their skin is smooth and they don’t mind being handled. My son often walks around the house with the snake around his neck. My wife has warmed up to him as well. I realize that reptiles are barely more intelligent than bugs, but because the snake lives in my son’s room he has come to recognize his scent and is drawn to him. It gives the snake a certain kind of personality.
Fast forward a couple of years. Now daughter is old enough and wants a pet of her own. I was pushing for another snake because we knew how to take care of them and they had proven to be a low maintenance pet. For some reason, however, dear daughter was married to the idea of a bearded dragon. We did a bit of net research and obviously weren’t thorough enough because we came to the mistaken conclusion that a bearded dragon would be an okay pet.
Let me count the ways I hate this thing:
- It’s ugly and not the least bit “petable.” The snake can easily be held, whereas touching this thing is like holding a porcupine.
- He is dumber than a rock. For example, every day when he sees me getting his crickets out to feed him he runs face first into the glass wall of his cage. Every fucking time. You’d think that he’d remember that there was glass there, but he keeps mashing his ugly, retarded face into the glass day after day. Yes, he is one retarded reptile. He’s… he’s a reptard.
- He has to be fed twice a day! The snake involves thawing a mouse out once a week. For the reptard I have to chop veggies in the morning and then feed him live crickets in the evening. Of course, dear daughter is too young to handle such responsibilities herself, so guess who ends up doing it.
- Speaking of having live crickets in the house, they chirp. I keep them under the bathroom sink next to my daughter’s room, but if the bathroom door gets left open then we can hear the chirping through the whole house. Unfortunately, sometimes the little bastards escape and make their way downstairs and start chirping up a storm, at which point I have to send the kids out on a seek and destroy mission.
- Did I mention how much the live crickets cost? No? Well, maybe I didn’t say anything because I’m so embarrassed by the fact that I have been roped into paying fifty fucking dollars a month on stupid live crickets! Can you believe that? Fifty dollars a month to feed some creature that I detest?
Oh, and unlike the once a week shitting snake, the bearded reptard shits every day. If my daughter can’t handle feeding, you can bet she isn’t capable of cleaning up his shit either.
I’ve seriously considered Googling “bearded dragon poison” to see if there was some way I could snuff this quadrupedal annoyance and make it look like it was natural causes. I can’t bring myself to do it though, because my daughter loves the little reptard.
Some days, though, I’m tempted to feed him to the snake.
The Bearded Reptard, Part II
Am I wrong to want this thing to die?
Right now wifey is away. As a result, an added duty of mine is to buy new crickets for the bearded reptard to eat. The crickets are one of the major reasons why I hate this thing so much.
Allow me to elaborate:
- Fucking crickets are expensive
- Fucking crickets stink
- Fucking crickets escape
- Fucking crickets chirp really loud
The manager of the pet store was showing me where the crickets are when he asked, “What kind of reptile do you have?”
“A bearded reptard.”
“Hah! That bad, eh?”
“I hate the thing.”
“How old is he?” the manager asked.
“Year and a bit.”
“Then why are you buying him crickets?” He went on to explain that a bearded reptard didn’t need insect protein after reaching a year old. I could just buy these little pellets and mix it in with his veggies.
I wanted to kiss the guy.
I was about to change my purchase to these magic pellets instead of fucking crickets when my husband training kicked in. Surely such a momentous decision as changing the reptard’s diet must be preceded by a discussion with wifey, should it not? I debated this for a moment or two and came to the conclusion that I would be better served to buy a tub of fucking crickets and consult with my significant other about the future diet of the reptard prior to changing the status quo.
I am indeed a wise man.
We had a chat on the phone that night and I expressed my enthusiasm about the possibility of no longer having fucking crickets in our house.
“The vet disagrees with him,” she said. “It’s best for him to still be eating [fucking] crickets.”
Don’t even get me started on the issue of paying a vet to check the little bastard reptard out to ensure that he’s healthy.
The result was that we got into a not so nice discussion about the optimal diet for a bearded reptard.
“He’ll be much healthier if we keep feeding him [fucking] crickets,” she said
“And this is supposed to convince me, how?”
According to the vet, via wifey, the bearded reptard will live another six years or so if we keep feeding it fucking crickets. If we switch to magic pellets then the reptard might only live another four years.
How is this a bad plan? Truthfully, I don’t see a downside. So I ask again, am I wrong to want this thing to die?
The Bearded Reptard, Part III
Something strange is happening to me.
I no longer want the reptard to die. What’s more, I don’t think I should refer to him as “reptard” any further. My seven-year-old daughter overheard me call her pet by that name and got upset. Even though I smoothed things over with her, the look my wife gave me was unpleasant. There is also the fact that the word I bastardized to formulate “reptard” is derogatory. No one would accuse my writing of being politically correct, but perhaps I should apologize for that one.
I’m sorry.
If it matters, I was being reflective and this word usage gnawed at me. Not only is it unkind, but I worried readers would believe I was a complete asshole, rather than only being somewhat of an asshole.
Anyway, back to the reptard.
Fuck. I mean bearded dragon.
His name is Spiky. Don’t get me wrong, he’s still dumber than rock, but I don’t hate him like I used to. My daughter gets him out of his cage sometimes and lets him tear around the living room, which is slightly entertaining to watch. He is also becoming less work.
Although not as good as the magic pellets solution mentioned in the second installment of this reptilian trilogy, we have found an alternative source of bugs for him to eat that we can rotate his diet on with [yes, by now we all know that they are “fucking”] crickets, so I don’t have to have crickets in my house all the time – just half the time. This new bug is a big, fat-ass-looking wormy caterpillar type creature. It beats the shit out of me what you call them.
Compared to crickets, these wormerpillars are like contrasting hanging out with your hot-looking female cousin to being forced to endure the company of your red-headed step-brother (oh, great, now I’ve got the anti-kick-a-ginger battalion on my ass).
Here’s why:
- Unlike crickets, wormerpillars do not escape
- Unlike crickets, wormerpillars do not stink (very much)
- Unlike crickets, wormerpillars do not chirp
Like crickets, wormerpillars are expensive. However, they are big, juicy bastards and one does the work of two crickets. Additionally, wormerpillars have a much higher constitution than crickets. About a third of the crickets die in the box before they get chomped down in Spiky’s gaping maw (it makes a crunching noise). Spiky won’t eat dead crickets, but wormerpillars always seem to be alive and squirming when he starts scarfing them down like Michael Moore and Rush Limbaugh going through a shared plate of chicken wings.
One bad thing about the wormerpillars is that the little pricks bite, but a pair of tweezers solved that problem. Just FYI, the tweezers are now dedicated to fulltime wormerpillar wrangling duty.
Even better is the fact that Spiky is full grown now, so we only feed him bugs every other day. He is shitting less frequently as well.
Man, my life must be really boring if I can prattle on endlessly about the digestive system of a stupid reptile. What does this entire tale have to do with fitness? Answer: absolutely nothing. It has everything to do with being a dad, however.
Anyway, my daughter loves the little guy. By default, I think that means that I need to at least tolerate him.
The Bearded Reptard, Part IV
The reptard is constipated.
Actually, scratch that. The reptard used to be constipated. He isn’t any more.
I’m getting ahead of myself. Suffice to say that the reptard had an issue with not being able to poo and we’ll go from there.
Crud, I said I wasn’t going to call him “reptard” anymore, didn’t I? Fine, his name is Spiky, because, you know, he has spikes. That, and he was named by a six-year-old.
Where was I? Oh, yeah. The reptard… fuck! I mean Spiky, couldn’t shit. He didn’t shit for about two weeks because the dumbass little bastard wasn’t eating his vegetables anymore. All he was eating was the wormerpillars. We stopped buying him fucking crickets a few months ago because they were such a nightmare and he loves those worm-things so damn much that it just made sense to stick with them all the time. Well, one exception is that a few weeks ago we celebrated Spiky’s second birthday by getting him some crickets as a treat, but that was it.
Yes, you read that correctly. We had a birthday party for him, and we bought him a present, and we sang him happy birthday. Welcome to my life.
Geez, this freakin’ story just keeps going off into the rhubarb, doesn’t it? Let’s finally try and get it back on track, with “on track” meaning a bearded dragon who can’t shit.
So, other than his birthday crickets, Spiky had eaten nothing but wormerpillars for about a month. We gave him his usual frozen mixed veggies everyday but he just ignored them, then he’d trample through them and kick them around his cage, then they’d rot, then they’d start to stink, and then I’d start to hate the little fucker all over again.
I guess it was a trade-off, because while his cage had rotting vegetables, what it didn’t have was shit. Let this be a lesson to any of you low-carb advocates out there. A low-carb diet is not only a massive failure from a sustained weight-loss perspective, but it makes you get all backed up with poo as well.
He got so constipated that he wouldn’t even eat his wormerpillars anymore. We put them in a plastic dish and usually he is so voracious that he leaps onto the dish and sends the little buggers flying everywhere and then he stalks them around the cage on a seek and destroy mission like Kirsty Alley going to town on a bag of salt and vinegar potato chips. Last weekend we gave him eight worms, but he only ate three of them, then he just sniffed at the others and let them be.
My daughter was crying because he was getting so fat from not shitting, and now he was not eating, so she was worried he was going to die. I had a perverted image in my head of him exploding and blowing reptard guts and digested wormerpillars all over the inside of his cage.
“Please eat, Spiky,” my daughter said.
“Yeah, Spiky” I added in a French accent. “It’s wafer thin.” Then my wife punched me. She never did like Monty Python.
Even though Spiky wasn’t eating his veggies, we kept giving them to him in the hopes that he would eat. In the past he had munched them down, eating everything except the lima beans, which made me think he might not be so reptarded after all because lima beans are just gross, but now he just ignored all of it. A few days ago we ran out of his frozen veggies and my daughter decided to make Spiky a nice little salad.
In other words, she took a handful of my expensive, organic, pre-washed mixed greens and gave him that.
Well, Spiky chomped it all right down, so we gave him more, and he chomped that down too.
The next day was an Armageddon of reptilian excrement.
Seriously, I never put any faith in cleanses as a legitimate weight loss treatment, but there might actually be something to it because Spiky looked downright anorexic. Oh, and there was a gigantic pile of shit in the middle of his cage. Not only that, but emptying things out perked Spiky right up, because he was dancing about his cage, running to and fro. In the process, he trampled through his poo and smeared it everywhere.
Apparently I’m the only one in the family who doesn’t have a powerful gag reflex, so guess who cleaned it up?
Anyway, Spiky is all better now.
The moral of the story, boys and girls, is to eat your vegetables, because if you don’t then you might explode, and I’m not going to be the one to clean up the mess you leave behind.
Episode V: The Reptard Strikes Back
Charles Darwin, what the fuck?
I’ve got a pretty good handle on how this whole evolution by natural selection thing works, which is why I can’t understand how the hell bearded dragons ever made it out of prehistoric times alive. Seriously, this thing is too stupid to live.
Spiky the Reptard is a Darwin Award Waiting to Happen, achieving all new levels of stupid that are putting his very existence in jeopardy. To paraphrase Darth Vader: the Fail is strong with this one.
Spiky is having some digestive issues again, but not only is he not pooping, he’s not eating or drinking either. The little dude is all dehydrated and has been lying around his cage, hardly moving, and generally looking like ten miles of bad road. I’ve been worried about him dying not because I could give a rat’s ass about him personally, but due to the fact that I don’t want to put up with six months of a little girl’s wails of “I MISS SPI-I-I-K-E-E-E-E-E-E-Y!!!”
The reptard has to live, at least until my daughter is a few years older and starting to notice boys so that Spiky’s demise would be less of a tragedy. He’s two-and-a-half now, and a bearded dragon’s life expectancy can be as long as ten years. I don’t want to be putting up with this guy for any longer than I have to, but if it could hang in there for three or four years then that should suffice. Yes, I’m actually looking forward to my daughter turning into a surly teenager who doesn’t give a shit about anything or anyone. Until that happens, however, Spiky needs to keep breathing.
You hear me, you little fucker? You are not allowed to die without permission.
Why is he near death? Well, this is where the whole natural selection bit gets damn confusing. Somehow, evolution set this thing’s brain to “zero,” because we decided to do some research on bearded dragons and discovered that what he’s going through is perfectly normal. The book calls it a state of “semi-hibernation.” I call it trying to die.
Essentially, they just stop giving a shit about life. They’re not really hibernating, but they’re not doing anything to help keep themselves alive either. Not only that, but they need to be “coaxed” out of this hibernation state by a caring owner. I told you these things were stupid. If brains were taxable, then Spiky would be in line for a rebate.
I ask you again, Charles Darwin: what the fuck?
You won’t believe the shit I had to go through to nurse this little prick back to health. I’m actually ashamed to call myself a man after doing this. Any other self-respecting Y chromosome owner would have just let the bastard take a dirt nap, but I’ve got a soft spot for little girl tears.
I’m going to go off on a tangent for a bit here. For the first time in, well, ever, I was getting the house all to myself for six whole days. I had some work stuff that I couldn’t miss and it gave me the excuse I needed to bail on a wedding (wife’s side of the family) that was way out east. She took the kids and I got to stay home alone. I had some pretty serious plans for what I was going to do to take advantage my six days of bachelorhood, and these plans did not involve nursing an ailing reptard.
I didn’t exactly have a lot of choice in the matter though, because my daughter made me promise I’d look after him. That, and my wife would have been super pissed if they’d come home and he’d croaked through my lack of effort to keep him from becoming fertilizer for our garden.
The book was pretty explicit as to what emergency procedures were necessary to keep Spiky alive, so here is the play by play on how I spent some of my week of freedom to save the life of something I hate:
The Bath
Have you ever heard the expression “Is a frog’s ass watertight?” It’s akin to, “Does a bear shit in the woods?”
Well, a frog’s ass may be watertight, but a bearded dragon’s is not. The book recommended a bath so that water can seep in through his ass and help with the re-hydration process. There is also the fact that being submersed in water will also prompt him to actually drink water. See, he doesn’t recognize a dish of water as something to drink. He’s so reptarded that he actually needs to be neck deep in the stuff to realize that “Hey, this is water. Maybe I should drink some.”
So I grabbed a plastic tub, filled it with warm water, and threw him in.
Anyway, I’ll be damned in the little fucker didn’t drink while he was in there. He sort of just hung out for a while, trying to figure out what was going on and not having much success, and then, for the first time ever, I saw him drink. I should explain that these things are desert creatures, or something (I’m not a reptardologist), and they can survive just on “dew” from a spray-mister and the water from the vegetables that he wasn’t eating. However, since he was seriously dehydrated more drastic amounts of water needed to be ingested.
He actually put his face right into the water and lapped up a generous portion. When he lifted his head out of the water I guess he decided that he’d had enough of this bath shit and started to spaz out like a six-year-old on a sugar rush who got a Nintendo Wii for Christmas (been there, done that).
In the midst of his semi-seizure I grabbed him out of the water and plopped him down on one of our ratty, couldn’t give a shit about beach towels. He squirmed around which served to dry him off and then he tried to escape, which is when I noticed that something was wrong, something seriously wrong.
The reptard couldn’t walk.
Normally when he walks he lifts his belly and tail high off the ground and trots around. This time he was trying to walk but his belly was dragging on the ground and he wasn’t getting anywhere. He was just staying in one place, legs ‘a flailing, and generally looking pathetic.
Fuck, the little bastard stroked out on me.
Then I realized that a stroke didn’t make sense. It wasn’t a unilateral paralysis that was taking place; all four legs were stilling working. It just didn’t make sense. At this point I recalled junior high school science class and learning about one of the dumber dinosaurs – the stegosaurus – which was so fucking dumb that it needed two brains: one to control the front end and another to control the back end.
Well that’s just great. I drowned the reptard’s ass brain. I’m in shit now.
I started to have damage control thoughts, like wondering about the whole “We gave him to a nice family that lives on a farm” story line, but realized that was never going to fly. Instead, I grabbed his tail, hoisted it up in the air, tried my best to channel the power of some crappy televangelist faith healer, and yelled out, “Walk, motherfucker!”
And I’ll be damned, but the reptard walked.
I still don’t know what the hell that was all about. Maybe I’ve got The Power, or maybe the water just weighed him down for a moment and he needed to find his balance. Either way, I got Spiky re-hydrated and we were on to the next phase of reptard convalescence.
The Olive Oil
Another recommendation of the book was to give him olive oil to help loosen up his poo. I’m a fan of olive oil – it’s the only kind of oil I buy. The stuff I get costs $18 a bottle and I was going to hand feed it to the fucking reptard.
I must really love my daughter.
I poured some into a small cup, dipped my fingers into it, and then let the reptard lick olive oil off my fingers. This whole process lasted almost an hour. To remind you, my wife and kids were out of town and I had better things to do.
The Baby Food
Again, the book. It said baby food squash was good for ailing reptards, and that I could feed it to him with a syringe (minus the needle, of course). Actually, considering the state of mind I was in at this point, it was a good thing I didn’t have any sharp implements at hand.
I sucked up baby squash goo, which required a special trip to the grocery store, into the syringe and gently squirted little bits into his mouth. Just like a baby, more of it ended up on his face than in his stomach, but he did eat some of it.
The Massage
I hate that fucking book.
It said I had to massage his belly to help him work the poo out. Because he’d gotten dehydrated and hadn’t shit in a few weeks his crap had turned into something akin to what happens to coal when it experiences millennia of extreme pressure. If I didn’t help break it up it might lead to a bowel obstruction and require surgical removal.
Surgical removal? Are you fucking kidding me? I’m sure that would run a hefty veterinarian tab that would more than pay for all new ski equipment for me. Stupid reptard.
So I rubbed his tummy. I found a lump of what I thought it was impacted reptard crud and massaged it for about ten minutes. Not long after Chuck Norris showed up at my front door and demanded I hand over my testicles.
The Excremental Aftermath
Fortunately for me, I decided to check on him about half an hour after I put him back in his cage. The last time he got constipated he’d had several hours to run through his poo and track it all over creation. It was an ungodly mess.
This time I’d found he passed the foul substance before he had the chance to recover from his monumental fudging, so it was still in a neat little pile in the middle of his cage. Except that it wasn’t neat, and it certainly wasn’t little.
You remember when you were younger and you went out on a righteous pub crawl bender, and then at the end of the night you staggered out of the bar with a belly full of tequila and smelly fingers and you came across the most disreputable-looking hot dog vender this side of Afghanistan and thought something like that would really hit the spot? So you asked for a dog with sour kraut, onions, cheese, and “lozzzaa chillleee…”
Remember what your crap looked like the next day? Well, there you go. That’s what I had to clean up.
The “good” news in all of this is that Spiky looks like he is going to make it. My daughter is pleased and is showering both him and me with love.
One day, a few years from now, she will become a teenager. She will get piercings and wear too much makeup and date scumbags with tattoos and motorcycles and generally hate the entire world. She’ll also quite likely stop caring if Spiky lives or dies. At that point I won’t have to make any Herculean resuscitation efforts should he go into another semi-hibernation; I can just let nature take its course.
This sounds like a good tradeoff. I can hardly wait.