Creep Show

 

 

Earlier last week there was an article about a man in NY City that called the SPCA to take away a pet spider. The reason he called was that it was a South African Baboon Spider the size of a dinner plate, five times as aggressive as Michael Vick’s pit bulls and armed with a venomous bite. All of those things are reason enough to never have one of those things within two million miles of my house. However, having come to his senses, he at least had enough sense to call some experts to take it away. My solutions could easily have involved a bazooka, hand grenades, burning down the house or all of the above.

That pales in comparison with this wack-job in Germany: “Police broke in to Mark Voegel’s apartment to find spider Bettina along with 200 others, several snakes, a gecko lizard called Helmut and several thousand termites had gorged on his body.” Bettina was evidently the black-widow spider that gave him the fatal bite. That is bad, but it gets a lot worse:

A police spokesman said: “It was like a horror movie. His corpse was over the sofa. Giant webs draped him, spiders were all over him. They were coming out of his nose and his mouth. There was everything there one could imagine in the world of reptiles. Larger pieces of flesh torn off by the lizards were scooped up and taken back to the webs of tarantulas and other bird-eating spiders.”

I understand the draw that exotic pets have on certain humans. There are actually tarantulas, for example, that can be quite calm and interesting to watch, although I would never let one crawl on me. I have had friends that have had reptiles, frogs, turtles and other creatures in their houses for amusement. There is a limit on what is amusing. I find nothing at all amusing about a BIRD-EATING SPIDER. A spider big enough to eat a bird is not a pet. It is not cute. Never mind several of them together. There is no element of entertainment in a black-widow spider, as I grew up around these little cusses and we did everything we could to avoid them.