Those questions are Rojie’s prompts for July 11 2026.
My answer is I’ve had different pets. They were:
- Small fish like guppies.
- Hamster.
- Two terrapins.
I was unsuccessful with guppies. I had a small tank aquarium and a pump to aerate the water. No matter how hard I tried, the tiny guppies swam over the rainbow bridge. I bought at least three batches of guppies and they all turned belly up. I guess those guppies would have cursed me as they lay dying. I didn’t take photos of my guppies while they were alive (or dead).
Next, I bought a small hamster. I talked to it but I didn’t feel that it understood me enough to talk back in its own language. It lived in a hamster cage, complete with a running wheel, and a staircase leading up to its second level loft. After around 3 1/2 to 4 years, which was the average life span of a hamster, it died.
I bought two terrapins from a pet store. The shopkeeper said they were male and female by discerning their underside shell patterns. They were very tiny then; about the size of my thumbnail. The shopkeeper couldn’t see the patterns properly and made a big mistake. He said they were male and female but, around eight years later, my vet who performed the autopsy, said the terrapins were both females.
I didn’t have a relationship with my terrapins. I was their sole caregiver, in feeding, cleaning and handling them. I didn’t feel them interacting with me. They were silent and reclusive. When it was feeding time, the larger female was adventurous. The smaller one always hides into its shell. It eats when I’m not actively looking at it.
In eight years, we moved multiple times, between rentals and semi-permanent homes. They died one morning, at a location where the tap water might have been “hard”. The bigger sized terrapin was the first to pass away. The other female died a few minutes later.
I went out to the front porch to feed the terrapins early one Saturday morning, when I discovered the bigger one wasn’t moving. The smaller one was sluggish in her crawl. Slowly, she stopped moving too.
Please don’t hate on me. I was emotionally upset and psychologically disturbed when my pets died. Everyone in my family shed some tears.
I couldn’t believe it. I thought terrapins would live dozens of years. They were with us for eight years. Why did they die? My family all cried.
I went back inside and googled for vets and the local official domestic animal post mortem department. The latter didn’t work on Saturday. Bad luck. I was told to fill up an online form and get my local vet to write up the documentation before sending in the carcasses for autopsy on Monday. I started to feel upset. I asked how was I to store the two dead reptiles until Monday? The officer on the line said something like “wrap them up to keep the flies away”.
I called a private animal clinic to pay a deposit online for them to fill paperwork before I could send in the carcasses on Monday. It was nearly $1000.
To cut the long story short, the animal clinic sent the carcasses for post mortem, which took almost two months. Tissues were extracted for lab cultures and six weeks to eight weeks was the usual time required for cultures to be fully grown for testing for the presence of chemicals to determine plausible causes of death. After two months, I received a report that said the results are inconclusive because the carcasses were in advanced state of decomposition.
Meanwhile, I had to arrange for cremation of the two carcasses. It cost around $300 for a semi-private, separated cage-like partition; so that the remains and ashes could be collected for storage. Other alternatives were a fully private cremation (expensive) or a mass cremation along with other animal carcasses. The latter method does not allow collection of remains and ashes as they’re mixed up along with the rest during combustion.
The pet cremation company offers a limited selection of urns to store ashes and remains consisting of bones, shells and non-combustibles. Shells don’t burn at the limited high temperature. I chose two urns. They were the size of the standard “honey pots” that we see on supermarket shelves.
Footnote – The two terrapins lived in a large plastic tub placed under the roof of the front porch. The only outsiders who could have thrown stuff into their tub were the next door neighbors. I was psychologically affected. I had suspicions on my neighbors and even those living on the opposite side of my street.
Footnote – Someone in my family now wants a dog/ cat/ hen and keep it indoors inside the house. I’m concerned about whether I can do the maintenance for the hygiene of the house and indoor pets.
Related:
The original post about my terrapins was this https://artmater.com/dreaming-of-terrapins-dream-interpretation-15/
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