Mine love their sweaters, too. Good luck on the hat, because it’s just not going to happen!
Knowing how you love yours as much as I love mine, I bet this will make you smile:
Well I’m glad to see this has turned into a “Let’s make fun of NailBunny for caring about the stupid animals” party.
And for the record, I did have a similar episode the last time we went to Red Lobster and had to wait for our table next to the lobster tank. Poor little guys. 
Have you asked the crabs what they think of the whole deal?
This is a bit better link to Jin’s pet crabs.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/jinwicked/76272.html#cutid1
In Coney Island they sell goldfish in a plastic bag. Oh, the indignity! Actually, this is pretty bad for the goldfish. There isn’t enough oxygen in those plastic bags and they were usually dead in a day or two.
Yes, we put them in a goldfish bowl when we got home. They still died.
In Atlantic City they sell hermit crabs in toy Jets and Giants helmets. They looked darned cute. They’ll sell you the whole habitat too. These guys’ll live just fine if you take care of them.
See, I’m always puzzled when people who eat meat are squeamish about where it comes from. I’m a vegetarian because, among various other reasons, I do care about animals, but I’ve also done stuff like help hand-make sausage in natural casing from ground venison.
I think any animal, cute or uncute, above the insect level, has a right to not be unnecessarily tortured or kept in pain. I do not think that any animal (of whatever species, other than human) has a right to a certain inviolable dignity or freedom from exploitation. Calendars with pictures of dogs and cats in period costume, bunnies dyed (with non-toxic coloring) pastel blue and green for Easter, and hermit crab shells painted bright colors… all allowable by my reasoning.
There ARE practices like this that are harmful to the animal. Painting on a turtle’s shell can kill it. Dying an animal with certain dyes can kill it or make it ill. Forcing an animal into completely unsuitable costume (too small, not shaped right) can injure it.
In general, though, I have no problem with stuff like this. I do understand the concern of “throwaway pets”, but doesn’t that pretty much describe every goldfish, anole or ant farm purchased?
I still wanna hear more about the feelings of trees.
This probably makes me a jackass on a number of levels, but I love that.
There’s a great Jack Handy on screaming trees. I laugh every time I hear it, and I love trees.
Don’t dis the trees, they might get their wittle feelings all hurt, and stuff.
Ooh! Ooh! Have I got some appalling info on hermit crabs for you folks. One of my ex-girlfriend’s high-school jobs was making hermit crabs. Ok, well, not exactly making them, but making them have pretty shells. Not painted shells or anything, but when the the crabs were originally caught, they had less-than-perfect shells, and the company wanted to sell crabs with the whitest, perfectest shells possible, because they sell better.
So how does one convince a perfectly happy hermit crab to move out of his fixer-upper and into a deluxe apartment on the east side? One word: torture. Start with 10 hermit crabs in ugly shells. Find 10 pretty shells you’d prefer they lived in. Now put these 10 hermit crabs in a big pot of water. Put the big pot of water on the stove. Heat the water slowly until the crabs freak the fuck out and vacate their shells in desperation. While they’re out searching for tiny guns to put to their own heads, fish all the empty, ugly shells out of the pot and dump the pretty shells in. Now turn the heat off, and when the panic subsides, each crab will scurry into his new home, where he can begin plotting your death (don’t worry, he’s harmless).
And as if that wasn’t awful enough, there’s a pretty fine line between “scaring them out of their shells” and “cooking them,” so she ended up making a lot of batches of dead hermit crabs, which don’t sell as well with the kids.
Is that close enough to “Hermit Crab Death Camp” for you, Metacom? 
…Where you were planning to eat nothing but rice and salad, right?
Alright, until today I had no idea that people actually kept hermit crabs as pets, so my ignorance of the subject at hand is unlimited, and I’ve learned quite a bit from reading this thread. In the interest of continuing my education, I have to ask about this:
They play? With toys? What kind of toys? And what on earth do they do with them? Are we talking fetching a ball, or tug of war with a tiny rope, or what?
I’m starting to think my life has been more sheltered than I ever thought possible.
Actually, yeah, I am vegetarian and I did only have a salad, so fuck off, mmmkay?
God forbid someone should profess to have empathy for anything other than themselves. It really does my heart good to know that I can post something like this on a board with hundreds of thousands of members, and not get a single likeminded response. Really boosts the old faith in mankind, if you know what I’m saying?
And since you fuckwits obviously don’t recognize sarcasm when you read it, no I don’t think trees have wittle feelings. Let me reiterate: I was KIDDING to make a POINT. It’s okay. Sometimes people of less than average intelligence miss stuff like that, so you’re not alone.
Anyway, just thought I might lend a helping hand and explain some stuff that flew over your heads. Now, since I was able to put my finger on why it bothers me, and satisfy my curiosity that I am alone in this opinion, and you’ve all had your amateur comedy night making fun of the crazy treehugger, can we let the subject die already? :rolleyes:
Anyone who feels sorry for the lobsters in the tank at the, um, Red Lobster, probably shouldn’t go there in the first place. Were you taken at gunpoint?
Actually, you said you were serious:
Their response was:
They had some extra sea shells and a few little plastic things that they would grab and drag around, or shake, or hide under. They would even go swimming in their very own pool, which was basically just a dish of water.
Their plastic toys were a little plastic palm tree, a little plastic ladder they would climb, and and an old plastic raft from a mini Hello Kitty bath toy thing.
It’s not hard to keep a hermit crab happy.
Mine came with broken, ugly, chipped up shells and they were allowed to live in any shell they wanted.
I once crab-sat a friend’s hermit crabs for a week and learned the following:
- they like to push stuff around at all hours of the night, making loud clacking sounds (I guess this counts as playing)
- unless the aquarium is kept immaculate, they smell like death.
I guess they can be kind of interesting, but as invertebrates go, I’d rather have a scorpion or something.
I find pincers to be far more threatening than jackboots, but maybe that’s just me.
I was Traumatized as a very young child by a live lobster. The Texas Bodonis were visiting the New England Bodonis. Some of the NEB had lobster traps, and several fine lobsters were obtained suitable for a Family Reunion Feast. I got to ride in the back seat of a car. Said back seat held me, Grandma Bodoni, and an ice chest with a large, very unhappy lobster in it. The lobster kept crawling out of the ice chest and waving its front pincers at me. Grandma Bodoni kept poking it back into the ice chest. Since her husband was a fisherman, she knew all about how to deal with seafood. I, however, had never seen a lobster before, much less been within pinching range of one.
I still don’t eat shellfish, but that’s because I don’t care for the taste. I’ve prepared a lot of shrimp in my time. And interestingly, I have a tank of Sea-Monkeys on my computer desk, which are nothing more than a modified species of brine shrimp.
One of the fuckwits checking in!
Look, I don’t think a thread like this is a reliable litmus test for the “humanity” of the boards, or their feelings about crustaceans. Just because the people who did reply employed some levity does not mean you should run screaming to the hills with your head in your hands because WE’RE ALL SO UNCARING.
I’ll go fuck off now.