Not the Best Pets

A little girl once went home from a birthday party with a goldfish in a bag. She had won it as a prize. Since then, this has been a fear lurking in the back of my mind, that somebody would thrust an undesirable pet on my daughter, and I would be stuck with it.

And then it happened.

I picked up my daughter from camp the other day, and she was so excited. Guess what was in her water bottle? It was lake clams. The campers had hiked to a lake, and an older girl had persuaded my daughter that she should scoop up some clams and take them home as pets.

The older girl knew a little bit about clams as pets. She knew they ate algae. She knew my daughter needed to keep them in water. She knew they should have stones and sand in the bowl. So here is what surprises me - that, having apparently had experience with clams as pets, she recommended them.

Here's the thing about my daughter's clams - we never knew if they were alive or dead. From the beginning of our pet experience to the end, it was never clear. It was never even clear how many clams there were, since the water was a little murky, and they may have been stuck together, and one of them may have been a stone.

Given that we weren't even very good at distinguishing clams from stones, we were certainly never going to be able to tell them apart. This was somewhat disappointing for a little girl who had hoped to name her new pet(s).

So, to be nice, let's just call them, collectively, Clammy.

Here's another thing about Clammy. They are very smelly. It may have been the algae, or it may have been the clams. It wasn't entirely clear what reeked, but it was bad enough that we had to keep them in the basement.

And here's another thing about Clammy. We really had no idea how to keep them alive, if that was even necessary, given that we weren't sure they were ever alive. No idea about water temp, or whether we needed to leave the basement light on for them, or how deep the water should be, or how rocky/sandy the bottom of their plastic bowl needed to be, or whether the chemicals in our water would be a problem, or whether they were upside-down or right-side-up, and if that mattered.

But I will say this in Clammy's favor. It took very little time for my daughter to tire of this pet. The whole down in the basement, smelly, not doing anything to indicate being alive thing meant that, when she wasn't looking, we were able to release Clammy back to the wild. And when she noticed, my daughter didn't really mind.

And so the lesson about how wild animals need to stay in the wild, that they aren't meant to be pets, was actually learned. And there weren't even tears.

Not sure if it was a happy ending, what with not knowing whether Clammy lived through it. But it might have been.