HomeCountry by Slim Randles

Before you know it, it’ll be time to say goodbye to Fluffy for the winter months. Now most of us love dogs and cats and horses. But why do we limit ourselves to having these for pets? It just doesn’t make any sense. For me, Fluffy is really an ideal pet. For one thing, I don’t have to feed him. Not at all. You see, Fluffy is a lizard. A real lizard.

He learned from his lizard mom and dad how to snarf up bugs and blink his eyes and do push-ups on rocks. Honest. I didn’t have to teach him that at all. Also, I don’t have to build him a house or fix him a bed in our house, because Fluffy prefers to live in the back yard in the woodpile. I mean, this is one self-sufficient pet we’re talking about here!

Now Fluffy isn’t perfect. You see, I can call the dog and the dog will come and I can rattle the cat food bag and the cat will come, but Fluffy has this heightened sense of independence that means he’s able to ignore me just about any time he wants to. It’s an American trait, of course.

The main reason Fluffy is my pet lizard is how much fun he is for the neighbor kids and my grandchildren. They come over and talk to him and, if he’s in a good mood and it’s a warm day, he might do push-ups for them.

Also, it makes my grandchildren look at me kinda funny when I talk about Fluffy and what he told me just yesterday. And what other pet automatically recreates itself every few years without us even realizing it? Try that with a poodle sometime.