Stella and Bup

I write today on my day off (Ahhh, at long last) and with a large predatory reptile not an inch away.  Come to think of it, Bup is closer than my beer. 

Speaking of which Stella Artois is a very delicious beer, but we beer drinkers have noticed your lack of substance Stella.  I am of course referring to your 11.2 fl. oz. capacity, which is staggering in this day and age when many beers regularly hit the 12 oz. mark.  For shame!  Did you think we would not notice that the prices stay the same but the quantity goes down?  I'd get very upset about this if I didn't have 30 more of you in the fridge, so that's all I'll say for now.  But I will say those horrible words, most crushingly espoused by mothers around the world: I am very disappointed in you.  And that doesn't even touch my personal pet peeve regarding the paper wrapper.  I realize there is a perforated edge, but it never tears along the perforation, though come to think of it that may be a universal quality of perforated edges.

What was I talking about?  Oh yeah, Bup!  Now speaking of Bup, a two year old, two foot long, nine pound, Savannah monitor lizard, I thought I would tell you what its like to share a life with a large predatory reptile.  For those who don't know Monitor lizards are the smartest reptiles on the planet.  There is a really good nature show by PBS about this on netflix and elsewhere called Lizard Kings.  You should check it out, you can even see lizards just like Bup completing science experiments.  Bup and all his monitor lizard cohorts evolved from a large aquatic reptile called a mossosaur, look it up, but suffice it to say the Mossosaur was the tyrannosaurus of the sea, the largest apex predator at the time.  Because all monitor lizards come from this one giant, aquatic, super predator, they are all comfortable in the water and can swim effortlessly even when they have never seen water before.  They are also very smart, which is something that is hard to explain because they are smart in ways that it is hard to get used to.

Bup had a wooden cage with a swinging door that opened outwards, the door latch was one of those window clasps that you turn to lift a window straight up.  Bup found out, actually we both found out, that if you rattle to door back and forth the clasp will break internally and repeated rattling will flip the latch and open the door.  When I read that Bups were escape artists I thought to myself, psh, how can he get out of a cage with a door and a lock?  Well, he did and he explored the whole house. I had to come home from work early to find him for fear of him eating the cats or hurting the dog.  He was chilling behind the sofa. 

And though our 120 pound rottweiler Nina is loath to admit it, nine pound Bup rules the roost and Nina gives him a wide berth, as does Buddy our 110 pound chocolate lab.  But Murrs, our seven pound cat had to find this out the hard way.   When Bup was exploring the house, as he likes to do, Murr decided to stake a territorial claim.  Murr walked towards Bup and sat in his intended path and waited, stoic, proud, fearless.  Bup walked forward, moving like a dinosaur--which I have to admit is part of the appeal--tasting things along the way until he came face to face with Murr.  An epic stare down ensued between  Felis catus and Veranus exanthematicus.  Cats, it is said, have an abundance of patience, but pales in comparison to that of a cold blooded reptile.  And while they locked eyes, Murr looking down at the reptilian predator that outweighed him by just a couple pounds, she must have thought she would win this stare down being taller, unimpressed and stoic.  Bup could have been cast from bronze, he was absolutely motionless, though when Murr moved so did he.  I was on the edge of my seat, both in preparation to break up a fight and in excitement, until it happen.

Murr, incapable of waiting any longer, leapt at Bup in a preemptive surprise attack.  It happened so quickly I could do nothing to stop it.  Bup's tail came from nowhere and bashed Murr mid-flight, like an anklyosaurus, knocking her aside where she scrambled up the couch, across its length, and back down to the carpet where I could hear her running down the hall in abject terror.  Bup watched all of this, and when she was gone Bup looked forward and continued exploring, as he had before he was so rudely interrupted.

The other day I went to get Bup out of his new Bup-proof cage when I saw he had rearranged it.  There is a large beer box that functions as his hidey-hole (pet stores don't make commercial hides Bup-size), a large plastic tub full of water all of which sit atop an indoor outdoor carpet.  Well, today Bup moved all of this around so that he had made himself a cave out of all of it, and it hid him from view from the outside.  I had to go looking for him before I found him in the corner seeming poised to escape when I wasn't looking.  Bad lizard.