Perfect Pocket Pets

Yours for only $395.00...

Well, we couldn't resist the hard sell. "He's furry, and tiny, and of course he will love you. Take him home today, or regret it forever..."

That's how we ended up with Thor, the Evil Marsupial, commonly known as a sugar glider. My husband, the self-proclaimed animal tamer, grew up on a horse farm and had squirrels and other random mammals as pets all his life. This will be no different, he assures me. This small creature will love us all.

And we forked over the absurd amount of money for his cage, his food, his vitamins, his exercise wheel, and of course, for him, himself. I mean, he came with everything, even a CD telling us how to make him love us. We bought him. He was going to love us. That is the American Way. We were going to be the best marsupial parents ever. We certainly paid enough to believe this, and our success with our chihuahua I guess made us believe that small mammalian love is available for the right price.

One month passes. He eats well, sleeps well, plays well, but he does not care one single whit for us. We bought him more things: an odor neutralizer. A new exercise wheel. Some potion that promised it would teach him not to bite us when we picked him up.

And guess what? He still doesn't care for us. After the biting and the running and the trying to buy more for him -- we still had to decide to let go. Luckily we found somebody to adopt him for now. But after all that money, with nothing to show, no more love in the house, and now the additional guilt of giving up...

What had we really bought?

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