SquawkRadio

We’ve talked about pets on Squawk before.  I remember waxing tearful and lyrical when our guinea pig, Muffin, died.  This is going to be a less lyrical and more pragmatic piece, because it’s about animals who aren’t pets.

If you have a small child, people think it’s a really great idea to give you a scientific experiment that involves life.  The latest manifestation of this kindly impulse is a plastic box filled with a weird blue material and a swarm of biting red ants (we know they bite because the material said so; we know they’re scary because if you take the box top off they swarm desperately to the top, trying to get out).  The idea of this pleasing scientific birthday present was that you chill your ants in the refrigerator for a few minutes to make them less likely to bite you and then dump them into the plastic container with the blue gunk in it.  Then you watch them burrow through the clear plastic walls.

Sure enough, our ants burrowed.  At first they just tried to get out, and when they found that was not going to happen, they started burrowing.  They made, oh, 6 tunnels.  The children loved this.  Every day after school they fought to hold the plastic box (shaking up the poor ants in the process).  They measured the burrows.  Great scientific thoughts were hatched on all sides.

Then the ants stopped burrowing.  Their little ant brains had processed the fact that 6 tunnels and a small plastic box encompasses the world.  So they went back to desperately trying to get out.  My children stopped looking at them.  I couldn’t help it.  The box sits on the kitchen counter, and I visit them, watching them try over and over to climb the plastic sides.  They’ve started to die now (only three months, the material promised).  I can’t put them outside because there’s snow out there.  There’s nothing I can do but allow the poor things to die, mired in blue mucks and trying to their last minute to climb a smooth plastic wall.

Then there was the so-called metamorphosis experiment.  This thing came as a froglet and quickly metamorphosed into—you guessed it—a frog.  A weird, white frog with five long fingers on each hand.  It was an under water frog, the material said.  It forgot to say that this kind of frog just keeps growing.  And growing.  It also forgot to say that the frog turned out to be banned from the US ecosystem and could not be set free, as we were informed by the pet store.

So after a year or so we bought this frog its own tank.  It stayed in the basement, singing under water.  This disturbed house guests a lot at night, but what could we do?  We bought it various castles and ferns for its water.  It grew old and seemed to lose its sense of smell.  My husband had to go down and make a fuss with the water before the frog would realize its food was there and come scoop it up in its little hands and take it to its mouth.  Finally after five years our local pet store owner realized that its singing meant it was female—and thus valuable.  He took our frog to breed froglets.  There was a huge collective sigh of relief.

Do I have to go into the butterflies?  The monarch butterflies who are supposed to hatch and sometimes do—and sometimes not?  The butterfly who couldn’t open her wings, and so lived for three days in the little cardboard box?

Is it any wonder that there are so many stories depicting humans as Gods?  Am I the only one who gets totally bent out of shape by red ants in captivity, or an African frog who finds herself in a New Jersey basement?