Is it ethical to feed your pets live food?

Is it ethical to feed your pets live food?
By Roxy Green

I suppose that this is just another leg to the 'should we eat meat?' campaign really.

Both reptile keepers and animal nutritionalists alike stress the importance of animals getting the same nutrition they would get in their natural habitat. I mean, you can't feed a snake bread and expect it to live long, right?

However, scientists have developed a line of lizard pellets that have the same, if not more, of the vitamins your pet needs that aren't always present in the bugs you buy. They've been fed nothing but cardboard for hours, if not days. Examples of this are by Zoo Med and Exo Terra, who promise "Exo Terra Bearded Dragon food is a delicious reptile diet, carefully formulated to ensure proper growth and health by providing complete and balanced nutrition. Exo Terra Bearded Dragon food is fortified with optimal levels of vitamins, minerals and amino acids so no other food supplements are required.".Does this take lizards out of the argument? No, I personally have two and only one of them would ever eat the pellets, opting instead for live food whenever she was givien the choice.

If taught to eat pellets as soon as they're on to proper food, they probably would eat them. Many lizard owners stress that they are only interested in food that moves because it's a natural instinct, so the pellets won't really work.

For snake owners there are two options, live mice or frozen mice. If you don't like the idea of either it pretty much prohibits you from keeping one at all. Known for their bad eyesight, snakes wouldn't be able to find a pellet even if one was developed, unless perhaps it either stank or moved.

There's not only the ethics of your pet to consider, but the ethics of the food itself as, after all, it is alive too. It's not always a quick death for them, I've seen my lizards only eat the tail of a worm and drop the head, leaning it to crawl away in what I assume to be agony.

These animals are bred just to be bought, sold and fed alive to reptiles. Is that right?

Well, it's what would have been done in the wild anyway so surely stopping our pets from doing what they do naturally is playing God? The bugs are bred especially for it so if the market wasn't there they'd have never lived at all.

Drugs?

Drugs?
An informative rant
By Roxy Green

Someone tell me, are people cool and interesting because they take drugs? or do they take drugs because they're cool and interesting? I don't get why they're linked.

I mean the band onstage haven't taken anything, yet they still get people stuck to them like magnets, with their girlfriends waiting loyally at the side of the stage. It's easy to tell those who are high and those who aren't, mostly because they're either staring at the strobe lights like a baby at a mobile, or they're actually watching what's going on around them. Somehow someone out there found the crazed, wide eyed teens on MDMA (or whatever the hell they're taking now) attractive and it's become a 'cool thing to do'.

Unlike smokers, who will sit you down and tell you what a bad idea smoking is, these teen wannabe junkies try to tell you how great it is and how it makes them feel, even though you've already seen how it looks, and that's bad enough. Kids, snorting MDMA off your mum's washing machine is not cool, it does not give you that 'rock star' lifestyle. In honesty, it actually just makes you look a bit of a twat.

For you older readers who don't know what MDMA (or Molly) is, it's basically what the kids are calling Ecstasy now. The chemical name is 3,4,-methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine, and if you've watched Breaking Bad, you probably know it's a bad idea to take anything with a name that similar to that of Methamphetamine, or crystal meth. But hey, that's just logic.

Yes, you will dance for hours after taking it. But the drug isn't safe for a reason, it will cause you to overheat to death. Your heart rate and body temperature will increase to the extent that your body just can't take it and packs out. So those of you who take it and jump straight into the crowd where it's sweaty and hot without all the dancing or the stimulant, think again. It's popular at gigs, parties, festivals and nightclubs as a 'fun drug' that picks you up and keeps you going for the entire four to six hours it's in your body, but in reality it brings depressive states once it's worn off and causes addiction. The cases of people accidentally taking similar drug PMMA and dying is increasing at a staggering rate, according to drug help charity Talk To Frank.

So yes, the cool and interesting kids are usually the ones that start off these trends, but just you watch as they start to slip and lose their grasp of reality. Their grades will slip, their attendance will go to pot (excuse the pun) and they'll get thinner and thinner, resembling regular users of pretty much any drug ever. Meeting the same fate too if they carry on.

If you or anyone you know is suffering from drug abuse or addiction, help is just a click away at http://www.talktofrank.com/