In my sophomore year at college, I decided to throw all semblance of logic and reason I've ever had out the window and I bought myself a baby Argentinian Tegu lizard [Tupinambis merianae]. Don't ask me how to pronounce that. I personally say "Tay-goo", though I'm pretty sure that is wrong. I had spent more than a year reading about how to care for these animals, and I was confident in my abilities to care for one and keep it healthy. I decided that his name would be "Taco". I'm not sure why, but it started a long-running tradition of naming all of my pets after food [i.e. Rubber Boa named "Pudding", two skinks named "Eggroll" and "Bratwurst", a crab named "Crab", etc]
As fate would have it, I actually was capable of keeping the animal alive and healthy. The problem is that keeping a giant lizard alive and healthy represents a massive drain and commitment of time and money, as well as oftentimes being a general inconvenience. It was nearly as expensive to feed him as it was to feed myself [a constant diet of chicken breast, tropical fruit, mice, rats, and chicks is expensive]. Every day I would give him a warm bath [to encourage him to defecate in a controlled setting, as opposed to on the floor], and every day he would spend most of his free time wandering around my room, and during most of that time I had to watch him to keep him from getting into trouble. I did that because his cage was boring, he clearly didn't like spending a lot of time in it, and I felt bad about it.
I had built for him, by hand, two 8ftx4ft enclosures. One at my college apartment, one at home. This became necessary as he quickly became too large to fit into a tank that could be transported from one location to another. Needless to say, moving a big lizard constantly between Buffalo and Syracuse was less than convenient in of itself. As fate would have it, I am also a colossal failure of a carpenter, and it wasn't all that difficult for Taco to escape. Several times I would wake up in the middle of the night to the sounds of him trying to make himself comfortable under my bed. Sometimes I wondered if it would be easier if I had a child instead. Never the less, I loved the giant, fat slug of a lizard and I couldn't fathom leaving him, even though it was probably for the best. In spite of everything, he grew to become extremely docile and was never really bothered by anything. In the end, the situation was decided for me by my landlord, who apparently didn't like having a giant reptile leaving piles of digested mice and quail chicks on his property. Leaving him was a... very bad day. He ended up with a little group called "CroZoo", which does wildlife/animal demonstrations for small children. Taco's gentle nature seems to have served them well.
What's the moral of this? I'm not sure. Don't get things that you can't keep, or else you'll get attached to them and then you'll have to get rid of it anyway?
