Worst Pet Ever*

There are pets that are good ideas -- dogs, cats, parakeets. (Some people might argue for the ferret, but I'm not one of them.) Then, there are pets that are bad ideas -- rabbits, mice, anything that could become dinner if you live on a farm. (If you would pay someone to remove it from your home, I also contend it does not fall into the "pet" category, so I've never understood the market for mice, rats or snakes frankly.)

Of course, as a child, you have no idea what constitutes a good idea pet or a bad idea pet. And while my mother was in her "we're not getting a dog" phase, I'm pretty sure I begged for every pet under the sun -- chicks, kittens, bunnies and birds included. I started with fish, had a hamster and eventually, around the time I turned 12, graduated to birds. But somewhere in between, I had the worst bad idea pet there is -- the hermit crab.

We all know how it happens. You're down at the beach. You go into some store with a shark's mouth for a door, and within 15 minutes, no souvenir T-shirt, bag of shells or gull  perched on a piece of driftwood will do. What better way to take the beach home with you than in the form of a tiny hermit crab who lives in a portable, plastic case with sand and plastic green grass?

(I should probably also mention that I was the child who tried to catch minnows at the lake so that they could be my pets at home. I prayed that unsuspecting turtles would find their way into my yard, and I was heartbroken on the day that some other super lucky kid took the class chick home after we had all carefully incubated him/her from egg to hatchling.) 

"Please, please, please," were very common pleas the moment I came within the vicinity of anything that could warrant a name, habitat and feeding schedule. I was an animal lover from the get-go.

But, I digress. My primary point remains that there is no worse pet than the hermit crab.

My sisters and I were always allowed to purchase three of the creatures and take them with us after a trip to the beach. After all, they were cheap and didn't require too much in the way of care and feeding. Plus, it's not easy to take a five-hour drive home with three whining and disappointed girls in the back.

And every year, despite my high hopes for the hermit crab, nothing ever quite worked out the way I planned. I often wanted to "race" them, but considering their speed (and that half the time they hadn't left their shells when I called "go"), I usually forgot about the competition, wandered off to do something else and when I remembered my "pets" three hours later, it was a desperate search to find them in the house before my mom got home and wondered when I'd gotten the permission for free-range crabs.

The other joy I found in having hermit crabs was waiting for them to molt.

"You'll have to keep plenty of shells around," the teen at the shark's mouth star would always explain. "As they grow, they have to leave their smaller shells and move to bigger ones."

This promised transformation fascinated me, and I made sure plenty of shells were on hand, at all times, just in case. I even hand-picked the shells hoping my hermit crab would find an even prettier home than the one it had before.

On the one occasion my hermit crab did decide to move out of its shell, it walked around naked for a few hours before settling right back into its old shell. Then, it stayed curled up in there for the next month, or however long it took for my mother and I to decide that the hermit crabs were probably dead and throw them out. 

Years later, someone told me that hermit crabs actually hibernate, so I probably threw away live crabs every year, but I'm not sure my hermits and I would have had much of a future together anyway. There's only so much entertainment a crustacean and plastic grass can provide, and hence, why I stand behind the hermit crab as the worst pet ever.

I do sometimes wonder if landfills are full of hundreds of recently-awoken hermit crabs along the lines of the alligator/sewer urban legend, but despite my desire for infamy, I'm pretty sure the hermit crab/landfill legend isn't the legacy I'm looking for.

* Yes, I'm in to the absolutes lately.