princesses of the kingdom of animalia
When Becky and I were kids we lived in strongly rural places: me on a couple of farms in the deep South; and she in and around several rural servicing towns across the country. In a place like that, animals are a part of your life: cats; dogs; sheep; cattle; deer; goats; chickens – you watch them all, living and growing and sometimes dying.
Some of them – especially dogs, cats, pet lambs and calves – became like family. For example, as part of the socialisation process for a new farm dog puppy, my Dad would “give” it to one of us to look after. It would be “our” pet until it came time to be trained several months later, and that dog would never forget its “owner” after that.
It’s not like that for our girls. They live in the suburbs. We don’t have a cat because of allergies. We don’t have a dog because I believe quite strongly that keeping dogs in town – at least the breeds I like – is bordering on criminal. We can see a working farm across the valley from the house, but that’s as close as we get.
But both our girls do seem to have quite a fascination with animals – it’s just that the only animals they have access to on a daily basis have quite a few more legs than any of the ones Becky and I used to love.
Like the other day.
Becky and Bella found a dead spider in the garden. And not any old dead spider either – one of those large hunters that would cover a 50 cent coin when at full stretch. The ones that, when inside, gallop across the floor at a fearsome rate and catching them for safe placement outside is out of the question – instead they feel the sole of your shoe fairly quickly. In fact, a “Large Brown Vagrant Spider”, according to the girls’ copy of Crowe’s The Life-size Guide to Insects of New Zealand.
Bella insisted it be brought inside. She lost interest in it pretty quickly, but Rosa, to whom the concept of death has not yet occurred, became obsessed with it. First it had to be placed on her hand, where it slid off. Then on her foot, where again, it slid off. ”’Pi’er, han’!” she kept shouting. The thing just would not co-operate!
The spider’s corpse suffered further indignities in Rosa’s inexact (almost two year old’s) handling, and Becky had to dispose of it before it lost all its limbs and became an indistinct mush.
And I’m wondering… is this strange? I would never have been that interested in spiders at that age… but then I had many other, perhaps better, mammalian companions. Are the girls missing out on something here? Or were their parents just lucky in where they grew up?
BadAunt
16 May 2005, 02:27 #
Kids keeping bugs as pets is an old tradition in Japan. You can get bug cages – the traditional ones are lovely little bamboo things. Beetles are the most popular, I think. I happened to be passing the pet section of a store yesterday and there was a gaggle of kids crowded around the bug cages, with their fathers. They looked almost hypnotised by the beetles. Here, at least, your kids would be perfectly normal!
I got a terrible shock when I first came here and was teaching some kids English. The cute little 5-year-old (with enormous dimples) was doing her ABC when a HUGE beetle suddenly crawled out of her sleeve and down her arm. I shrieked (wouldn’t you?) and pointed, and she thought my reaction was hysterically funny. It was her PET. (I’d thought it was a cockroach. It wasn’t. It was some kind of very large beetle)
You can read about bug pets in Japan here: http://www.planet-pets.com/petperiodicals/petperiod296.htm
Jessie
16 May 2005, 23:58 #
That would freak me out too!
Alan
17 May 2005, 23:29 #
BadAunt: that’s really cool! Personally I wouldn’t mind a bug as a pet… so long as I know where it is at all times. So an aquarium full of wetas, I like, but not if the girls leave the lid off and a couple days later I’d be fishing them out of the undies drawer
Jessie
19 May 2005, 11:37 #
We had to remove a spider fittng the description of your dead one from our kitchen sink this morning… it was HUGE! Bigger even than a 50c piece. Lucky my arachnophobe flatmate was long gone for work, or the screams would have been heard for miles around.
BadAunt
21 May 2005, 17:39 #
You tend to find bugs in the underwear drawer here anyway – Japan is a very buggy place. In winter it’s OK, but once the rainy season starts (any time now) we’re likely to be afflicted yet again with … oh, as a particularly unpleasant example, leeches in the bathroom. (I never, ever shower without my contacts in these days, since standing on one.)
Jessie: You didn’t read about the spider my brother has in his garden, did you? In New Zealand, even. It was worse than anything I’ve seen here (in Japan), and I’ve seen some BIG ones. But at least we don’t get giant illegal immigrant spiders ballooning over from Australia!
I blogged about it – there’s a link to a picture that will keep you awake at night:
http://presentsimple.blogspot.com/2005/05/spider.html
Alan
21 May 2005, 21:27 #
BadAunt: hmmm, I thought I’d commented on that post of yours, but I mustn’t have. My girls would have loved to see that spider… maybe not to handle it, but they would have loved to see it.
And obviously my strategy of ignoring bathroom grime by not wearing my glasses in there is not going to work in Japan…