Teaching kids responsibility

The woman on the phone sounds very excited.

“Please tell me where I can find good books on turtles,” she says. “It’s urgent. I need them by tomorrow.”

I suggest the Internet, but she’s not interested. “I want my daughter to be able to see the books,” she says.

It turns out that her daughter is turning eight the next day, and the woman has decided that a turtle would be a perfect birthday gift.

“I want to teach my daughter responsibility,” she says.

As a pet-lover, I always feel that a family isn’t complete unless a pet is an integral part of the household.

I’m not so sure that a turtle is a good pet to start with, unless the kid has already shown an interest in this particular animal. Besides, if the child doesn’t understand “responsibility” already, turning a living thing into a lesson seems to be a disaster waiting to happen, at least from the animal’s viewpoint.

     As a case in point, I’ve just been given two turtles by a family who live several sois away. They’re moving to another house and can’t take the animals with them.

   There has been some disharmony amongst the family members, though. The young son of the house loves the turtles very much and doesn’t want to give them up. A friend gave them some turtle eggs, which all hatched, but the boy played too roughly with the hatchlings, and only two turtles survived.

I’m horrified. Can you imagine how much pain these creatures suffered in the short time they were alive? How about the pain of the two survivors?

The people bring the turtles in their container, a 60-cm-square, 30 cm high plastic box, the kind that people fill with ice and canned drinks.

In this particular container are some rocks, bricks, gravel and very dirty water. The turtles themselves are red-eared sliders (tao yipoon), a very hardy breed. They’re two or three years old, not yet fully grown but much too big for such a small home.

I ask what the son has been feeding them, but the rest of the family don’t know. The dirtiness of the water tells me nothing, except that sonny hasn’t been changing the water very often.

The turtles look active. At least their shells are firm, although somewhat slimy.

At least they’ve survived, but I’ll bet the family never expected hatchlings to grow so large.

The mother on the phone isn’t concerned about the future size the soon-to-be-acquired turtle, nor even the fact that red-ears, if they survive their first few months, will live for 20 or 25 years.

“If my daughter doesn’t want to take care of the turtle,” she says, “we’ll just throw it away in the nearest khlong.”