People are so capricious. They're so darn arbitrary about the animals they deem "cute" enough to have pets. There's a very thin line between the animals that are seen as food and those that are seen as companions. So thin is this line, that it wavers considerably from culture to culture. Consider the Hindu cow, and then consider the East Asian meat markets with cat and dog carcasses strung up for purchase. None of it, of course, is based in any way on logic or common sense.
Take the dog, for example. The domestic dog is a direct descendant of the wolf, a creature feared and reviled for centuries. Yet, you take out its hunter instinct and a few brain cells and it's practically a member of the family. A hairy, parasite-ridden member of the family that happens to be prone to rabies. A smelly, allergy-irritating, noisy, crotch-sniffing member of the family that will eat you out of house and home and stands no chance of ever being a productive member of the family. Come to think of it, having a dog is not completely unlike having an alcoholic uncle come to live with you. Furthermore, I PERSONALLY know at least three people who were badly mauled by dogs, one of which was my cousin who was on the wrong end of her beloved pet's brain tumor-induced rage. By badly, I mean that it went for the throat with the intent to kill and resulted in at least a dozen stitches. I know a lot more people who were "sort of" mauled by canine madness. Dogs are not good pets at all.
Let's examine the other most popular pet: cats. They share most of the hygienic problems of dogs, but lack sociability. On the bright side, they're more portable and may someday just run away and never return. On the down side, their crap REALLY smells in spite of their tendency to bury it. It can also cause toxoplasmosis. Not a good thing to have. Plus, they claw the furniture with more frequency than dogs and tend to bring dead things into the house. Although they're usually too small to cause real physical damage to a person, that doesn't stop them from trying. They also suffer from close genetic association with large predators that made more than one quick meal our foreparents.
After that, I suppose, come birds. Yes, 4.6 million homes in the U.S. feel somehow incomplete without a cacophonous, disease-ridden, shit-where-you-please avian at their heart. I've had a lot of pets in my day, but it seems a little unfair to keep a wide-ranging animal such as a bird stuck in a cage. Of course, this completely omits the rather fuzzy line that divides food birds from pet birds.
Then come the rodents. RODENTS! These little pests are responsible for the spread of more disease and the consumption of more grain that COULD go into the mouths of starving humans than any other creature on the planet! And yet people want to keep them as pets! Their only good point is the fact that they don't live long, a feature that is also one of the few good points of cats, since they often help the little vermin to that great burrow in the sky. Rats, mice, gerbils, hamsters, rabbits…they're all the same crap.
And people look at me like I'M nuts just because I have a few arthropods! Arachnids don't smell! They can live for many months without food! They don't bark or meow or squawk! They're often hairy, but they only shed once every few months, and that's just one big piece of skin! They don't ruin furniture! They carry no diseases that are communicable to humans! Their poop is colorless and odorless! They can live for up to 20 years! They are universally a useful, beneficial creature, preying of pest insects and small pest mammals! And finally, no one's ever been known to have been hunted down and killed by a tarantula (except for the brief spate of 40-foot mutants in the 50's, but that was the government's fault). Although other spiders and some scorpions have been known to take an occasional human life, they're responsible for far less deaths than any other pet species I can think of. Well, ticks are a pain in the ass, but they don't count. Nobody keeps THEM as pets out side of the backwoods of West Virginia. "Yee-haw, Billy-Jean, I found me a new pet who just kinder stuck on me and follered me home. I reckon he wants tuh be my friend."
It all comes down to this: all endotherms are noisy, hairy, disease-carrying, smelly, raucous beasts who eat all the time and spread their excrement everywhere. Why people would look at me like I'M a nutter just because I've indulged my fascination for arthropods a little is beyond me. Clearly, I'm being discriminated against on the basis of the irrational societal fear of anything with 8 legs. I say that Arachnophobia should be as non-PC a homophobia, xenophobia, and…uh…mega-androphobia (that being the fear of tremendous trouser snakes, an affliction that has vexed me mightily). If there's one good thing I can say for Europeans, at least they're much more advanced in the acceptance of arachnids than Americans.
And for the record, lizards and amphibians come exactly in between those icky endotherms and the impeccably perfect arachnids.
