Chris and the Rat Bins - Justice Le Tran Alexander

I used to work at an exotic pet store and it was awesome. I worked with reptiles, amphibians, and invertebrates everyday tending to their needs and this was something of a hobby more so than a job, but there were definitely some more nasty parts of the job. I had two managers over the course of my time there. Myles was my first manager and the one who hired me and he had a lot of clout in the local herpetological community. He left soon after I was hired to go work for the Virginia Department of Wildlife.

Now Chris was the manager after him and he was serious about his inverts. Tarantulas, centipedes, millipedes, isopods were all up for game and I ended up learning a lot about keeping these guys. He tells me this one day behind the store at the company Christmas party, "You know Justice you're a weird kid." I don't necessarily disagree most people would find cleaning rat feces deplorable but it was part of the deal. I always thought though while scooping dustpans of deification after school about those slaughter houses where millions of animals are processed as walking pieces of meat. 

Most snakes have little choice in what they're able to eat in captivity because they literally won't eat a vegetable unless it was shaped like, smelled like, and was as warm as a small animal. I think I know what Chris meant a lot of the time but he had no room to talk. He spent so much time with the spiders that he would talk to them like infants. So I guess it went both ways.

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