Okay so heres a little background information.
My boyfriend is extremely allergic to cats and/or dogs so growing up he has never had a pet. So he has never been able to experience the bond you can have with a pet, where I have grown up with pets my whole life and being an only child they were my brothers and sisters; very much apart of the family. Since he doesn’t really understand the bond you can have with an animal he’s always teased me, calling me “the cat woman” (even though I only have one cat, but she’s spoiled =] ..)
When we first started dating, 4.5 years ago, he didn’t understand why I treated my pets the way I do. He would always say “It’s just a stupid cat” or “The dog’s not going to care if you call it stupid” (I believe its mostly in the tone of someones’ voice when talking to animals that helps animals understand if your being mean or nice to them.) But the past 2 years he’s slowly starting to understand and accept my pets as members of our little family.
We took a vacation over the summer and picked up a baby yellow bellied slider from one of the beach stores where they sell them illegally (it was about 1″ they’re suppose to be 4″ to sell). He is so cute and my boyfriend absolutely loves him. We gave him a pet/upper class name that we created and ended up sounding really cool and he is very interactive and does cute things like tries to get your attention by tapping his thermometer against his tank (over and over and over again) until you give him more food (he’s SUCH a pig). He is very interactive and does cute baby turtle things all the time. Whenever my boyfriend leaves for work our turtle starts waving frantically in his tank and we always say that Rexamous (turtle’s name) loves his daddy.
So now my boyfriend has a bond with our baby turtle and he loves him. He’s even said that he could watch him in his tank for hours and that it’s better than tv. We consider him very much apart of the family. But since my boyfriend and I do not live in the same home yet, our baby turtle lives with me so I can make sure he gets lots of interaction. (I’ve even turned on the tv just so he can watch it.)
So now my question:
Looking online for the perfect birthday/xmas gift for my boyfriend I came across at first “Triops” and “Sea Monkeys”. I thought these were great because he can grow them from eggs and watch them grow up into these gross looking creatures they’re also fairly inexpensive and easy to care for.
He’s what I know about them:
Triops – Hatch in about 24 hours but only live for about 90 days.
Sea Monkeys – Take about a week to see little specs of them moving around. Live for about 2 years.
But then I came across those “Grow A Frog” kits and became interested. I looked up what kind of frogs they are – either African Clawed frogs or African Dwarf frogs and did a bunch of research on them and watched a bunch of videos.
Here’s what I found out about them:
African Clawed frogs get much bigger than the Dwarf frogs and they eat everything in site. You can buy them from GrowAFrog and watch them grow into these huge eating machines and they can easily be hand fed (by sticking your hand in the tank water) worms and other things. But they don’t really move around much (I guess the dwarf ones do more so than the clawed ones). But they can live for a VERY long time, and are fairly inexpensive for a gift.
Then I found videos of Pixie frogs (American Bull Frog) and Pacman frogs. I thought both were very cute and very cool because you can feed them just about anything and they’ll eat it (of course they’d only be fed what they should eat) right from your hand if you want.
Heres what I found out about them:
They eat a lot, make cool noises, get huge, and don’t really move around much. I found a few videos of these frogs eating baby mice and I know my boyfriend would think it was the coolest thing to feed his new pet a baby mouse. But I guess that you can only feed them the mice every now and then, and they’re other diet is like crickets and worms. But I DO NOT want crickets because I know they are escape artists and SO annoying when you can’t find them and they chirp in your house throughout the whole night.
My concerns are mostly that I do not want to get him a pet that just sits there and is very boring. I want him to be able to interact with it, even if its just feeding it once a day. Watching the videos of the Pacman frogs and the Pixie’s, when they’re being fed they are very active. But they’re tanks require moist soil I believe and I worry about mold developing quickly (which I’m allergic to).
After reading all this and now having an understanding of my concerns and what I’m looking for, what do you think would be a good pet for my boyfriend?
Looking for fairly interactive, easy
