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Herb Benham: Spending $280 on a sick lizard? A pet is a pet
| Friday, Aug 1 2008 9:03 AM
Last Updated: Friday, Aug 1 2008 9:08 AM
This may have started Sunday while walking the dogs when Poco, the blind dog, ran straight into a tree.
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“Ouch,” winced Rog, my walking partner.
This wasn’t the first collision for the blind dog and, as a consequence, she has developed somewhat of a hard head to go along with her cheery attitude, if a dog’s attitude can be described as cheery.
Still, I looked to make sure she hadn’t dislodged any teeth or cut the inside of her mouth. In other words, something that could necessitate a trip to the vet.
Yes, the vet, a place that my friend Wendy and her family visited recently with their bearded dragon. Wendy owns the Coffee Cottage near Rabobank Arena, manned by her and her 16-year-old son, Chris, who has a sly personality and is a World War II expert to boot.
“I had to take the lizard into the vet’s,” she said a couple of days after Poco had barreled into the oak tree at Hart Park.
You had to take your lizard into the vet’s? Why? First of all, what are you doing with a pet lizard and why did you have to take her to the vet’s?
Let’s backtrack. I like lizards. We used to catch them in the fields by our house when we were kids. Then we’d bring them home, sometime tailless, and put them in empty five gallon Sparkletts bottles with dirt at the bottom.
They always died. Or escaped. They died so quickly we couldn’t take them to the vet if we’d ever thought of such a thing.
They disappeared before we could name them. They were all pretty much alike. Fun to catch, hard to keep in captivity.
“This one is called a bearded dragon,” said Wendy, who has always struck me as a pretty sensible woman.
“She’s about 18 inches long. We paid $60 for her six years ago.”
You paid money for a lizard? I would have caught you one for a smoothie and a peanut butter bagel.
“We’ve gotten pretty attached to her,” she said. “She’s got quite a personality.”
Now, there’s a first. A lizard with a personality. The next thing you’re going to tell me is that your lizard plays Scrabble.
“She wasn’t feeling well so we took her to the vet,” she said. “She stopped eating.”
Maybe it has do with what lizards eat. As good as mealworms and live crickets might sound to a lizard, even a lizard needs a change of pace occasionally. With that, Wendy showed me the vet bill. “With the X-ray and the blood tests, the bill came to $280.83,” she said. “You should have heard my husband when I called him.”
I didn’t know where to start. An X-ray? How about a hand-ray? Blood tests? I didn’t know a lizard even had blood. I thought it was mostly guts in there.
“Not only was it $280, but the vet told me she didn’t know whether she could save her.”
For $280, you don’t want a dead lizard. A dead lizard is one thing. A dead lizard that cost $280 is another.
“The vet says she probably just swallowed some sand. It’s all balled up in her. She also said we ought to put AstroTurf in her terrarium rather than sand.”
Maybe. What if you find that your $280 lizard has graduated from crickets to AstroTurf?
“The vet kneaded her stomach. This morning, she seems to have moved some of that sand,” Wendy said, not wanting to go rich on the details.
A few days later, the lizard died. The family decided she deserved better than being tossed out with the trash, so Wendy put her in a shoebox and put the shoebox in the fridge until her husband could get home and dig the hole.
She was a good lizard. What’s more, worth every penny, Wendy said.