Stone Soup by Jan Eliot for August 02, 2013

Will Alix ever get the picture? Probably never.

Just tell Alix it’s illegal to keep wildlife as pets. (Which it is, and for good reason.) I’m sure she doesn’t want to be a lawbreaker!

Is it big enough to boil up and eat?

His natural habitat is my crawfish pot.

Take ‘im fishin’

Yes….. where I grew up, there was a little portion in the nearby woods that we sort of made an animal cemetery. My older brother once tried to keep a wild rabbit. It was dead the morning of the day after he caught it. He blamed the dog, but he didn’t understand that wild rabbits will lay down and die if they can’t escape.

Oh yea, we’ve buried hamsters, fish, turtles, dogs, cats…Our yard was well fertilized over the years. Oh, even a few chickens.

I want to have Alix’s outlook…anything’s possible and there’s always new to learn

I see now Evie.

Sad but true. At Acadia National Park in Maine, my son scooped up some ocean water with some tiny baby crustaceans in it…none of them survived the next day. Wild animals need to be in the wild.

In China and Japan, it’s common to keep bugs as pets in the summer time. One year we had a pair of praying mantis. Unfortunately, one morning we woke up and saw the evidence that the female eats the male after mating since only his legs remained.

I agree with Dean just cook the crawdad and eat it what is meant for.

My brother and I got a baby chick. Played with the poor creature all evening and probably exhausted it. It was dead in the morning.

I lived in the city when I was a kid, so only was able to have some goldfish in a fish bowl…didn’t know the bowl’s water should have been changed every day…what a mess. Felt sorry for the poor fish, they expired soon after I got them…