The Christmas Lizard

When I was in middle school, I got the best Christmas present that I could ever have asked for.  His name was Isaac.  He was a very young bearded dragon, and he was the absolute light of my preteen life.  Isaac wasn't my first pet lizard - as the row of shallow graves in my parent's yard could have attested - but I like to think that he was my first serious pet.  As in, the first pet where I had a clue what I was doing.

Isaac wasn't an impulse gift.  I'd spent months before hand researching pet lizard options, visiting pet stores (I was lucky at the time that my town had a specialized fish and reptile store full of very knowledgeable, friendly staff), and planning a care regime.  For months, I felt like I'd talked of little else except bearded dragons.  When the little guy was finally revealed to me at the end of a Christmas morning that first saw me unwrapping several new pieces of pet care equipment (including a book on bearded dragon care and management), I felt like I was ready.

A lot of pets change hands this time of year, and many of them come to a bad end.  Some new owners mean well but don't know what they're doing.  Others lose interest.  It's important to remember that your new pet is a new responsibility, and you owe that responsibility not to the giver, but to the animal itself.  Be it a dog, a bird, a fish, or a tarantula, it is a separate, sentient being with its own needs and preferences, not a toy, not a fashion accessory.   Before anything else, the needs of the animal come first.

In other words, no anime-themed terrariums.