My First Pet

You know when you play that game about figuring out your stripper name and you take the name of your first pet? Well now you do. Anyway I was thinking about it and I remembered my first pet was a hermit crab named Claudia. Now Claudia had an unfortunate demise... that is we got the house fumigated and both my brother’s and my crab passed away. Or rather slowly and painfully asphyxiated whichever you like.

Here’s the kicker. I was having family dinner the other week and I told this story – after we’d all worked out our stripper names (mine’s Claudia Chelmer) I told the story of poor choking Claudia and mum chimed in with – Claudia didn’t choke she cooked!

?

I’m sorry, mum, what?

“Your crab Claudia got really sick after the fumigation - we didn’t know it would affect them so badly and in the end she lost her legs one by one. The poor thing only had little eyes flitting about – it was still alive and suffering – so I dropped it in hot water”.

Now that’s the humane story I heard. Here’s what I visualised...

I find out seventeen years later that my poor crab, my first pet, my only crustacean love was boiled alive? How psychotic is that? Hadn’t she suffered enough? I imagined my poor little crab thrashing its eyes about in agony (that was only thing it could thrash around given it didn’t have any more limbs) crying silently that I’d abandoned it... trying to escape. To which mum answered “Well it didn’t move after I dumped it in”.

Good point. R.I.P. Claudia.