The Great Cricket Famine of 2005
By Bill Zahren
(Posted 3/24/05)
I buy crickets. With real money. I pay 8 cents a cricket. If people back in my little hometown -- tony Lake Park, Iowa, population 1000 -- heard I actually pay money for live crickets, they'd go up side my head with a boat oar.
It would probably make the in the hometown paper: "Former Lake Park resident moves to big city, buys crickets."
Well, the reason I buy small crickets (and crickets come in two sizes, just for your records) is that I own a lizard.
(Insert the sound of me getting smacked again with a boat oar again here.)
The pet count at the Zahren household now stands at four. Our 75-pound, mixed-breed, dog and alpha pet, Chester; female guinea pigs Penny and Patches (they're such sows!); and now Buddy the lizard.
If we can just go back a couple of months, I can tell you why I blame the whole tragedy on the American educational system. It all started when my daughter Jena's third-grade class got some lizards as part of their lifecycle studies. You know, using live animals to illustrate the lifecycle. Sounds innocent.
But I just bet those sneaky devils at Petco or Petsmart or somewhere like that put the schools up to the whole lizard thing. It's brilliant, and I'll tell you why:
After the "unit" on "lifecycles" was "over," the teacher decided to "give away" the lizards. They had about five of them or so. So every kid who wanted a lizard put his or her name in a drawing. And, joy of joys, my youngest daughter's name was selected. She brought the lizard home and named it Buddy.
Buddy is an "anole." Which is a little bitty kind of lizard. I wanted to name him Chuck (get it? Chuck Anole? HAR!). Buddy's retail value is $7.
Well you just can't keep a lizard in a shoebox, chief. It's not right. The thing will have a crappy quality of life and then die. I'd open the box one day and find a petrified Buddy. My daughter will be bawling and pissed and the lizard will stalk me in my dreams like the beating heart that drives the guy insane in Edgar Allen Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart.
So, the responsible thing to do (and I have RESPONSIBLE stamped on my massive forehead) is to get Buddy a "habitat" which is pet-store speak for "something that starts a massive cash harvest." So I got the approved glass lizard case. I got the cover that included both the heating light and the full-spectrum white light. (The white light bulb alone cost $27.) I got the fake wood thing to put inside the "habitat." About $100 later, the $7 lizard was quite comfortable. All this is why I think Petco puts the schools up to it. They KNOW the teachers will give the lizards away, which will touch off a flurry of suburban spending. Diabolical.
But it gets better. Buddy only eats live crickets. He turns his snout up at dead crickets. So I go to the pet store once a week and buy 20 live crickets. The pet store people are starting to recognize me. I bet they call me Cricket Boy behind my back. Nothing more emasculating than standing in line to pay $1.75 for an bag filled with air and 20 small crickets.
This crazy scene got even kookier a few weeks ago when I went to the pet store only to find they were out of crickets. I went to another pet store and they too were out of crickets. The pet store people told me there was a cricket shortage. A cricket famine in the land, if you will. They expected a shipment of crickets in the next few days.
I imagined a giant cricket plantation somewhere, working double shift to meet demand. Little male cricket studs on the job, impregnating the females who each laid 87,912 legs, each of them worth about a nickel to the cricket farmer. "Come on, Sparky, put your back into it. There are millions of hungry lizards out there!"
The shortage went on for a week. I started looking like one of those forlorn guys in the black-and-white Dust Bowl-era newsreels as I desperately trying to scrape up enough crickets to feed the lizard. I kept Buddy alive by managing to find places where they could find just enough crickets to get by. The whole time Chester was looking at me like, "Just open the lid to the cage and I'll solve your problem."
There was some cold weather, the cricket seller said, and that was killing the crickets in transit. Tragic, really. Similar to the way cold weather kills oranges on the trees in Florida, I assume. I'm shocked it wasn't on the national evening news.
We've survived the scare for now, but the supply lines are still pretty tenuous. I'll be going to the store tomorrow to get another week's worth. Let's hope my cricket shipment has come in.
(Insert boat oar smack here.)
©2005 Bill Zahren
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