8:16am Friday 1st May 2009
By David Barnett
We have had a couple of new pets in our home recently – a pair of Wuddle-Houses by the names of Ben and Gwen.
They’ve been living in an old Persil liquid washing soap box, the lid dutifully punctured with a screwdriver to create air holes, and a selection of slowly-rotting plantlife spread about the bottom to replicate the natural environment of the Wuddle-House.
Ben came first, and after providing a day or so of sheer delight, we decided to bring in Gwen to give him some company.
What? Sorry? You don’t know what a Wuddle-House is? I’m quite surprised, because they are very common. They’re quite tiny, with a jointed exo-skeletal shell and 14 jointed limbs. You usually find them under rocks or in rotting wood.
It might actually be that you know the Wuddle-House by its less-common name, the “woodlouse”, but you wouldn’t get much truck with that from our children Charlie and Alice, who are safe in the knowledge that Wuddle-House is the correct terminology and that this tiny animal which forms the sub-order Oniscidea within the order of Isopoda is a quite valid pet.
Never mind that we have two cats who are infinitely more pleasing to have sitting on your lap (have you ever tried cuddle a Wuddle-House? It is neither easy nor particularly pleasant). A pet isn’t deemed a pet in our house unless you actually go out and hunt it yourself.
So the Wuddle-Houses, Ben and Gwen, took up residence in the aforementioned clear plastic Persil box on Charlie’s bedside table.
And rather swiftly died.
If anyone from the League Against Cruelty To Tiny Crustaceans is reading, then I would like to assure them that we did not wilfully neglect Ben and Gwen. We might have actually done more for them – for example, leave them alone in their natural environment under a brick rather than put them in a plastic Persil box – but we had the best intentions, and thought that a few damp sticks and some grass and a couple of dandelions might prove to make their surroundings more palatable.
Or perhaps Wuddle-Houses just don’t live very long anyway. Perhaps they were quite old Wuddle-Houses when Charlie and Alice captured them. Whatever, I rather think that when we found them, on their backs with their 14 little legs up in the air, they looked, well... happy.
I thought that the experience with the Wuddle-Houses might have taught Charlie and Alice something about the great cycle of life and death. And it did; they immediately went out to find something a little hardier to put in the Persil box, and soon came back with a couple of what looked like small, black millipedes.
Until a couple of days later, when a disappointed Charlie came out of his room holding what looked like a splinter and was, in fact, a dead millipede.
Funnily enough, the cats have been giving his bedroom a wide berth recently...
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