You finally get the filter working through some magical acrobatics only to have the power flicker at midnight about a week later. Everyone knows filters only work for fish. You call some strange man who is apparently customer service for the entire company and he acts like you’re stupid because you have a turtle instead of fish. Once you finally get a filter put together, they never work. Imagine trying to put together a piece of Ikea furniture, only you have a few missing parts and a few extra parts. They come to you in around 8 billion pieces and directions that look like a preschooler’s crayola experiment. I don’t know what kind of sadist invented aquarium filters. The whole story also includes The Filter. GO GOOGLE TURTLE PENISES RIGHT THIS SECOND. The whole story includes discovering a giant purple THING protruding from your turtle and sobbing, googling for emergency exotic vet care, only to discover that that nightmarish THING is his PENIS. The whole story includes mucky water, day-long water changes, turtle health scares. That’s the financial part, but not the whole story. He seemed to realize at the last minute that $300 was a ridiculously low price, but by that time I was loadin’ it into my dad’s truck with a peppy, “THANKS! BYE NOW!” The aquarium alone would’ve cost thousands of dollars had I not purchased it from a slightly confused dude on Craigslist. “Hardly anything” turned out to be a $200 filter (followed by a $300 filter when that one quit, followed by another $200 filter when that one quit), a $70 lamp (replaced every 6 months), $8 food (replaced every few weeks), water vacuums, water dechlorinator, hundreds of dollars of water bills, exotic vet bills, and the pièce de résistance, a 140-gallon aquarium. I trusted her completely, got a big ol’ tupperware for his first tank, and brought him home. “He needs hardly anything.” I did no research. She knew I couldn’t have furry pets in my apartment, so she suggested I adopt him. Someone who hadn’t done a lick of research (it’s ironic that I’m being judgy about that you’ll see why) adopted him and then, upon realizing he might carry salmonella, was going to abandon him in a lake where he wasn’t native and would have summarily killed everything or been killed. Don’t buy turtles.īut Squirt was a rescue. Since they’re marketed to impulse buyers who don’t know how to care for them, they often live short lives in tiny enclosures. Squirt was a rescue turtle, and I don’t feel it’s ethical to adopt turtles any other way - those cute quarter turtles you see for sale are often mistreated and sold illegally. So whenever someone asks me that question, I have to pause, take a deep breath, and begin at the beginning… He has the biggest personality and brings me tons of joy.ĪND HE IS A RIDICULOUS AMOUNT OF TROUBLE. Occasionally someone considering adopting a turtle will ask me if Squirt, my red-eared slider, is difficult to care for.
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