Board Thread:Fun and Games/@comment-27388204-20160921055834/@comment-27388204-20160922094927

Forten wrote: LysurusPeriphragmoides789 wrote: Oh and that's a Venus flytrap I use as a disposal for whatever my centipedes and scorpions don't eat. There's a part of me that thinks: Those centipedes are kinda beautiful. There's just another, small part that wants to know why exactly this man has them as pets... Several reasons really. However, first I will say that attention is not one of them. Most certainly, having these pets does gain attention, but that is not why I keep them - attention is merely a by-product. I will also say that I, and eveyone I know IRL, see me as qute a normal person.

Now, bugs have always fascinated me, and when I first watched David Attenborough's Life in the Undergrowth, which features a centipede hunting bats in a Venezuelan cave, I was enthralled by centipedes in particular. Then I went to a pet shop to get food for my fish (which I no longer have), and I saw several large centipedes for sale. However, as I was only 10 years old, they throught it was too risky to let me have one. At the age of eleven, I got my first centipede (the striped one featured in my blog post) for my birthday, and, 4 years later, it's still with me. Back then, the reason I liked keeping centipedes (and scorpions) as pets was purely because I found them fascinating, though while I never classed myself as arachnophobic, I had what I saw as a healthy respect for centipedes, which have a terrible reputation due to their highly defensive nature and agile movements. But now, I have another reason. I learnt that centipedes, and to a lesser extent, scorpions, are quite intelligent as bugs go, and demonstrate a learning capability not seen in most arthropods. Now, I'm doing "socialization" work with my centipedes, getting them all accustomed to human contact to the extent I can just reach into their enclosures and pick them up without them even attempting to either get away or attack. It has been working better than I ever imagined. Handling centipedes, some of the most feared of all bugs, will certainly earn you respect among the invertabrate hobbyist community - I get a lot of "that is so brave" and "you're so tough for a fifteen year old", and while I appreciate these compliments, that is far from why I do this. I do this for the centipede's sake, to show that centipedes don't deserve their reputation as vicious killers. I think all they need is a heart to love and understand them. And that applies to all bugs. We do need to appreciate them more, and realise that just like us, they are animals, animals that want the best for their species, and are worth just as much on this earth and any other species, including ourselves.