Hermit crab races
The lessons learned and the lives lost
The only thing scarier than finding out someone you know has a rat in your toilet, is finding a rat in your own toilet. When my friend texted that this happened to her, while I felt bad for her, I immediately started spiraling because this has been a recurring nightmare of mine and I was now just one person removed from the experience.
For decades, I’ve been worried about rats in plumbing. Rats who are smart enough and wily enough to live in sewers and crawl up pipes. Rats with blueprints of modern housing who’ve figured out the infrastructure and decided to use it against us. My husband thinks this is insane and does the same condescending laugh when I bring up rats in toilets that he does when I confuse “Star Trek” and “Star Wars” or Led Zeppelin and Def Leppard (the latter largely for comedic effect and not because I truly thought “Stairway to Heaven” and “Pour Some Sugar On Me” came from the same minds — although full disclosure, I did just google “did Led Zeppelin write Stairway to Heaven?” to be sure).
He is wrong to laugh, and I am regularly able to produce articles from reputable sources (as well as the “Daily Mail”) confirming that this is not only possible but has happened to real people who also did not deserve it. My friend’s plumber confirmed: under the correct circumstances (specifically a crack in the sewer line plus heavy rain plus the absence or dislodgment of a backflow valve), then it absolutely can happen.
The thing about rats, though, is that some people love them. On purpose and by choice. Rat people are a whole category — people who looked at the full menu of domesticated animals and said, actually, I’ll have the rat. I get the logic, sort of. Rats are smart, demonstrably smart, in ways that other common pets are not. When Youngest was lobbying for a pet some years ago, the rat was her opening offer, citing their intelligence as the primary argument. I did not find this as persuasive as the shorter lifespan but I understood the case.
Ferret people are a related genus. If you know someone who owns a ferret, you already know this, because they’ve told you. Ferret ownership is not a private matter, it’s a visible and/or vocal personality trait. I don’t fully understand ferret people either, but I have a grudging respect for anyone who has identified what they want and committed to it, as well as deep personal empathy for anyone (human or otherwise) with a long torso.
The thing that bothers me is not the rat people or the ferret people. It’s the rest of us who have spent decades assigning animals jobs they never agreed to, and then acting surprised when they fail to perform (there’s a tangent to be made about my kids and chores here too but I promised myself I’d stay on topic today).
The goldfish teaches early responsibility and low level home decor. The hamster teaches the circle of life as well as an understanding that nocturnal activity from those around you negatively impacts sleep. I have learned a lot of life lessons about betta fish — seven of which lasted a combined total of three years when I was in my 30s and who are now forbidden in our home by Jeff who had to play Dr. Kevorkian more than once to a $4 fish with dropsy. And the hermit crab, at least in southeastern Pennsylvania in the late eighties and early nineties, was the starter pet. Starter for what, exactly, was never clear.
A hermit crab is not a pet. A hermit crab is a dinosaur bug that smells bad and has minimal needs. It does not bond with you. It does not respond to its name. It doesn’t even have the brain structure to understand language. It will not comfort you when you’re sad or learn to do anything on command.1 Apparently over time they may recognize your shape and smell which is theoretically better than nothing but not by much.
If you take it out of its little cage, it will crawl on your hand and you will spend the entire time hoping it doesn’t pinch you, which is the complete opposite of what a pet is supposed to make you feel. The only genuinely fun part of hermit crab ownership was picking out the different shells — because theoretically it would move to a bigger one as it grew — and choosing the color of the gravel.
And yet, I brought my hermit crab(s) on family trips. And I had enough friends with hermit crabs for us to stage races of our “pets” that didn’t know any commands. I remember a group of us gathering with our hermit crabs at an elementary school friend Emily’s house to have some kind of hermit crab “derby” in Emily’s garden shed. Only for Emily’s mom to come in and step on one of them. I don’t know if it was mine or Emily’s. It doesn’t matter and it says a lot that I can’t remember. That hermit crab came to battle and lost the war.
I’ve been thinking about whether this was specific to our generation or whether it’s still happening — whether somewhere out there a parent is currently buying a hermit crab at a pet shop and telling themselves it’s educational. My suspicion is that millennials mostly got this out of our systems and then overcorrected dramatically. We went from $0.99 hermit crabs that died mysteriously and taught us nothing to spending four figures on orthopedic dog beds and specialty grooming and silk-lined dog sweaters to reduce matting. We didn’t stop using animals as delivery systems for our emotional needs. We just moved to bigger, nicer shells.
Perhaps the rodent people are, in retrospect, the most honest pet owners. They’re not pretending to be learning a lesson or craving emotional support. They wanted rats and they got rats. And, frankly, they’re probably more upset about rats drowning in toilets than I am. As someone who has a toy poodle currently medicated for anxiety, and suffers from light paranoia, I’m definitely not sleeping better at night.
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Some may choose to point out that my dog Sam also struggles with his name, language, and learning commands but sometimes we need to throw out outlier data when we’re making a cogent argument.