Critters rock

This is Gabriel, a Savannah Monitor, the coolest lizard I ever had the pleasure of knowing (followed very closely by Harry, of course, who is actually almost tame enough now to start to compete with Gabriel's claim as coolest.) I gave Gabriel up a few years ago when I reaized that there is a huge difference between seeing a very large lizard and thinking you can handle it, and actually having to handle said large lizard.

Gabriel was about two and a half feet long when I sold him, no where near the six or more feet he was going to be fully grown, and he was way too strong for me - he was all muscle and the demand to be held. I felt that if he were to twist around suddenly while I held him and my thumb or fingers were in the way - which was almost every time I held him, as he was impatient with my slow mauevering of him so that he could rest on my chest as he liked - he could have easily broken them.

I tried ignoring his endless scrabbling at the side of his cage to get my attention, every day, the whole time I was within eyesight, but it broke my heart to do so. He wanted so badly to be held, or even just to have his ear holes scratched. He loved having his ear holes scratched, to the point that - like a cat - he would lean into my fingers, eyes closed, and if the scratching lasted long enough, he'd actually end up laying full out on his side with his head on my fingers, in a state of lizardy Nirvana. It was, well, cute. Endearing.

And having to ignore him because I couldn't handle him anymore felt cruel to me.

So I put an ad in the paper and the first call I recieved was from a man who loved Savannah Monitors, had raised many of them over the years from hatchling to adulthood, and who had been wanting to get another for awhile but didn't want to start with a baby again, which was all that was available from pet stores and breeders in the area. Having had so many of them as adults, he could handle their size and strength, and had plans to do what I would have eventually done had I been able to keep Gabriel - to devote an entire room to him, not just a large cage, which is best for such large creatures.

It was hard to give him up, especially since he never once stopped demanding my attention, but I could not continue to ignore his demands. He was such a sweet and gentle lizard, and to ignore him long enough would have made him a diffrent lizard, perhaps not so friendly. I couldn't do that. He deserved better.

I was confident that Gabriel would have not only the care but the attention as well that he so depserately wanted with this man, and so I said my goodbyes to him and sent him on to a hopefully better life.

I never heard from the man I sold Gabriel to again, and of course promptly lost his phone number. I can only hope that what he'd told me about his experience with monitors was true, but he seemed to know what he was talking about at the time, so I never really worried, only fell prey on occasion to those horrible "What-Ifs."

I miss Gabriel.

There's really no point to this blog other than to say that: I miss him. This started simply as a test to try some HTML code I found online to add pictures in these posts since my computer doen't like to play nicely with Blogger, rendering much of it's point-and-click editing useless. But I just had to choose this picture to test with, didn't I?

Damnit, I want to go home and hug Harry now. Being a smaller lizard species, I'll never have to give him up, and for that I'm thankful.

Ah hell, I'm gonna get even mushier: hug your pets today. They love you more than you may know.


PS- The HTML code worked. Sweet.